We're a nonprofit trade association, and our website is our primary channel — research, certification programs, member resources, and a 349-article news archive. Going multilingual had been on the list for years and kept getting deferred, because every route we looked at meant either paying translators per page or bolting on a widget that machine-translates in the browser and does nothing for search (we tried a few of these, and they were all clunky).

MultiLipi solved the part that actually mattered to us: the translated pages are real pages.

We tested this properly rather than taking it on faith. We fetched our Spanish, Japanese and Arabic pages using a Googlebot user agent, and the HTML came back fully translated — titles, meta descriptions, headings, body copy. That's the whole ballgame for an organization whose visibility depends on search. A client-side widget would have given our visitors translated text and given Google nothing.

Setup was genuinely fast. Subdomain mode, one CNAME per language, one script tag. Fourteen languages live the same day, each with valid HTTPS handled on their side. The only thing we changed on our end was generating proper per-page hreflang tags so each translated page points at its true equivalent rather than the language homepage.

The glossary is a valuable bonus. We're an association with trademarks, proprietary frameworks and program names. Out of the box, machine translation cheerfully rendered our organization's own name into Arabic, Japanese and Turkish, and turned our central brand concept into a different phrase in every market. That's not a translation problem, it's a branding problem.

Adding those terms to the glossary fixed it across all 14 languages, and we verified every one. Our brand now reads consistently whether someone lands on the Italian page or the Korean one. If you have any proprietary terminology at all, budget an hour for this — it's the difference between looking international and looking machine-generated.

Custom fonts per language was an unexpected win. Our brand typeface is Latin-only, so Arabic was falling back to whatever the visitor's device happened to have. Setting IBM Plex Sans Arabic in MultiLipi meant our Arabic pages look designed rather than defaulted. Easy fix.

Credits are consumed by changed text, not by deployments. We redeployed the entire site several times during setup and it cost very little, because the source strings hadn't changed. That's the right model, and it meant we could iterate without watching a meter.

The translation editor matters more than you'd expect. When we added glossary terms after some pages were already translated, one language kept serving the old wording. Being able to open the stored translation and correct individual strings directly meant we fixed it in minutes instead of filing a support ticket.

What we'd love next: glossary locking works reliably for names and short phrases, but we have a full trademarked sentence, and it holds in 11 of our 14 languages rather than all of them. Understandable since a sentence is a harder matching problem than a proper noun, particularly in languages without word spaces. It's a niche need and the workaround is straightforward, but sentence-level locking would close the last gap for us.

Would we buy again? We already decided to keep it before writing this. For an organization that had written off multilingual as too expensive and too complicated, going from English-only to fourteen properly indexed language versions — with our brand terminology intact — was a genuinely good week's work.

I am seriously impressed and amazed. One of our best AppSumo success stories.