With the Blazor relaunch, carecom.de was bilingual – German and English. Recently the site started speaking four languages: Finnish and Polish have joined. The genuinely remarkable part is how little effort it took.
Why these two languages in particular? The human reason first. Finnish is a small bow to the long-standing relationship with Konecranes – a valued client connected to me through many shared projects. And Polish is dedicated to two dear friends of Polish descent. Lovely reasons to grant a website a few more languages.
From a professional point of view, though, the aim was something bigger: to show what the use of AI makes possible in localization today. Multilingual support was a real barrier for a long time – cost, coordination, time. That very barrier is now shifting noticeably.
Claude Code handled the extension in four cleanly separated phases: first the infrastructure – routing, language switcher, configuration –, then the short interface strings, next the longer inline prose of the individual pages, and finally the existing blog posts. After every phase a green build and a commit. All in all a matter of hours, not weeks.
The architecture from the relaunch helped: localization rests on a generic text record and a source generator that reads XML files per section. There, another language is essentially „just one more column". Adding Finnish and Polish was therefore largely mechanical – exactly the structured, repetitive work an AI agent excels at.
Even so, it bears repeating: localization is more than translation. Machine translation is remarkably good today, but a human eye remains important – and here the human reasons supply it as well: the connection to Finland and the Polish friends are a natural corrective. One small, visible result, by the way, is the new compact language switcher in the top right.
For small and mid-size companies this means: reaching an international audience no longer requires a large localization budget. If you are thinking about offering your content in several languages – feel free to get in touch!