Designing for three languages from day one
Jeriel Isaiah Layantara
CEO & Founder of Round Bytes
Round Bytes ships most products in three languages: English, Bahasa Indonesia, and Mandarin. Our own website runs on all three. Tucope runs on all three. Optserv runs on all three. Doing this well taught us that localization is not a feature you bolt on at the end, it's a constraint you design around from the first Figma file.
Three things we've learned the hard way:
Mandarin is denser than English.
A button that says "Get Started" in English might be two characters in Chinese. A form label that wraps gracefully in English will feel awkward and empty in Chinese. We design layouts that breathe at both extremes.
Bahasa Indonesia is longer than English.
Often 30-50% longer. "Sign In" becomes "Masuk," fine, but "Create an account" becomes something like "Buat akun sekarang juga." Nav bars break. CTAs overflow. If you don't test with real copy, you'll discover this on launch day.
Right-to-left? Not yet, but plan for it.
We don't ship Arabic yet, but we design CSS with logical properties (
margin-inline-start vs
margin-left) so the day a client asks for it, we're not doing a rewrite.
Localization isn't translation. It's design discipline. If your product is targeting Southeast Asia or Greater China, this conversation needs to happen on day one, not at QA.
