A Maldivian business website often needs to speak two languages. Most of what makes that hard is invisible until the design is finished, which is the most expensive moment to find it. These are the decisions to make first.
One site in two languages, or two sites?
Decide whether every page will exist in both languages. Often it should not: a council may publish notices in Dhivehi and keep a shorter English page for visitors. A page that exists in one language only is a perfectly good choice. A page that exists in one language by accident, because nobody got round to translating it, is not. Write down which pages need both.
Dhivehi runs right to left
Dhivehi is written in the Thaana script, from right to left. On a Dhivehi page the whole layout turns around: text sits against the right edge, the menu starts on the right, and arrows, back buttons and progress bars point the other way. English text, numbers and web addresses inside a Dhivehi sentence still run left to right, so one line can change direction several times. A site built for English and then translated usually gets these details wrong in small, visible ways. A site designed for both from the start does not.
Fonts have to carry both alphabets
Not every font contains Thaana letters. When a letter is missing, the browser either substitutes another font, which can look uneven, or shows an empty box. Choose type that works for both languages, and look at real Dhivehi text in it on a phone before approving a design. Placeholder text in Latin letters tells you nothing about this.
Prices need the rufiyaa
The rufiyaa now has a sign of its own in Unicode, and almost no font has it yet. When we checked hundreds of fonts on our own machine, none carried it, which means a price can appear as an empty box on a visitor's phone. In our own products we ship a very small font that holds the sign, so prices print correctly. Whoever builds your site should be able to tell you how yours will, or you can write MVR or Rf instead.
Search needs a separate page for each language
If a language button swaps the words on the same address, a search engine sees one page in one language. Give each language its own address, so a person searching in Dhivehi can be sent to the Dhivehi page and a person searching in English to the English one. It also means each page can have its own title and description, written in that language.
Who writes it and who checks it
Machine translation of marketing copy is fast and often wrong in ways a native reader notices at once. Decide who writes the Dhivehi, who reads it before it goes live and who will add new pages later. That person needs to edit text in the admin in Dhivehi, so the admin itself has to cope with right to left text as it is typed.
Forms, emails and error messages are text too
Decide which language a person gets back when they fill in a form on the Dhivehi page. The confirmation message, the email that follows and the error that appears when a field is empty are all words, and a site that translates its pages but answers every form in English is the first thing a bilingual reader notices. The same goes for booking confirmations, receipts and notices sent later.
Dates, names and the small things
Decide how dates and times are written, how island and place names are spelled in each language, and what appears in the browser tab. Small inconsistencies are what readers remember.
What it adds to the project
Two languages is more than two copies of one site. Design, content, testing and upkeep all grow with the number of languages, and the work you do not see, mirroring the layout, testing on phones and checking every form, is where a bilingual project takes its extra time. Ask any studio how it prices it, and ask to see a bilingual site it has built.
See the layout for yourself
Our marketplace has three Dhivehi news websites written and laid out right to left, for an atoll weekly, a national daily and a sports desk. They are ready made, so they show the layout and not a custom design: the atoll weekly, the national daily and the sports desk. If you are planning your own, read how we build websites, or talk to us, and we will start with a free working sample.