When your audience reads two languages
Half your audience reads one language, half reads another, and you have one page. There are three workable answers and none of them is to write everything twice.
Three honest options
Your bio link points at one page, and every choice from here is a trade. Only three of them hold up. Put the page in the language most of your audience reads. Keep the labels short enough to work in both. Or run two pages on two addresses and link between them.
None is free. The first leaves part of your audience reading a language they did not choose. The second limits what a label is allowed to say. The third doubles the upkeep and asks the visitor to make one extra decision before they get anywhere.
| One page, one language | One page, short labels | Two pages, two addresses | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Works when | One language clearly dominates | Labels are names and verbs | Both halves are large |
| Upkeep | One page | One page | Two, kept in step |
| The visitor | Reads, or translates in their head | Reads a short label | Picks a language first |
| Breaks when | The smaller half drifts away | A label needs a sentence | One of the pages goes stale |
People skip the third option because it sounds like work. It is less work than it sounds when pages are cheap: one account here holds up to ten of them, each with its own address, template and statistics, so a second language is a second page rather than a second account.
Doubling every label makes the page twice as long
The instinct is to write every line twice — the bio in both languages, then each link labelled twice with a slash between. It reads badly. Six links become twelve rows of text, every visitor treats half of them as noise, and the half they need is no longer near the top because the other half is interleaved with it.
Slashes are worse on a phone than they look on a laptop. A doubled label wraps onto three lines in a narrow column, and a three-line link stops looking like a button. Two languages on one row also spend the one advantage a short label has: you can take it in without reading it.
What needs translating and what does not
Very little of a page is really language. Most of it is names, and names do not translate.
- The bio line. It is the only sentence on the page and the one people actually read.
- The first two links — whatever you most want tapped.
- Anything built around a verb: book, order, subscribe, read.
- Not brand names. Not yours, and not anybody else’s.
- Not platform names. Instagram is Instagram in both languages, and a row of platform icons says it without a word.
That usually leaves three or four short strings. It is a translation you can do properly in ten minutes and check by reading it out loud.
Pick the main language from where your audience is
The main language is not the one you think in. It is the one most of the people who open the page read comfortably. Those are often different, especially if you moved, or if your work travels further than you do.
You have evidence if you look for it. Which language gets replies. Which posts get saved and shared. What language the people who message you write in first. If the answer is genuinely split down the middle, that is the case for two pages, and it is the only case that pays for the extra upkeep.
Do not publish a translation you have not read
Machine translation is a fine first draft and a poor last one. It fails on short promotional lines in a particular way: it returns something grammatical, plausible and slightly off, and slightly off is what your audience judges you by. A bio line is eight words. Nobody needs a machine for eight words they never check.
The mistake is not using the tool. It is publishing the output unread. Ask someone who speaks the language to open the page on a phone, once, and say whether anything sounds strange. That takes a minute and catches nearly everything.