Your English Site Isn't a Translated Site

Salem Al Hajri (ALYASI) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 05:55:57 +0000

I published the English version and opened it to check.

The header image had a bold Arabic sentence across it. The text underneath was fully English. The page spoke one language; its own image spoke another.

And the image isn’t a detail. It’s the first thing a visitor sees, and it’s what shows up when someone shares your link on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. An English reader sees an image they can’t read, and decides before reading a single line.

So I designed a second image. Not a translation of the first — an independent design carrying the same idea.

Then the link

The article ended with a line: Need a website or store? Get in touch.

The English reader made it to the end, liked what they read, clicked the button — and landed on a page entirely in Arabic.

I lost them at the last step. Not in the content, not in the design. In one link that forgot to ask: who is this visitor, and which language did they arrive in?

What no one sees

Then I found the layer that never shows on screen at all.

Google doesn’t know on its own that two pages are the same article in two languages. Without tags telling it so, it treats them as two pages competing for the same reader — and it picks one, burying the other. You think you doubled your audience. You actually split your own weight in half.

The harder part: meaning doesn’t translate

This is the deepest thing I learned, and the furthest from technical.

I have a line I repeat: the work is mine, the harvest is yours. In Arabic it lands like a proverb. Translated literally into English, it came out correct and lifeless. Accurate, forgettable.

So I rewrote the English version instead of translating it. Translation carries words across. A version carries the effect across.

Why patching costs more than building

I didn’t build from scratch. I bolted an English version onto an existing Arabic site, and it cost me two days.

Had I built the site from day one as a bilingual platform, all of this would have been decisions made once: URL structure, a field per language in the database, an image per audience, links that know which language their visitor arrived in.

Whoever bolts a translate button onto a single-language site pays twice — once for the button, once for fixing what comes after. Whoever builds a bilingual platform from the start pays once.

The takeaway

The visitor never sees any of this. That’s the point — work that succeeds behind the scenes is work nobody notices.

Whoever bolts on a translate button thinks they’re done. Whoever builds a version knows they’ve just started.

Watch the video version →

If you’re thinking about a bilingual site or store — get in touch — the work is mine, the harvest is yours.

My Silent Partner

Salem Al Hajri (ALYASI) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:42:24 +0000

Before

I worked alone. Not because I had no one — I had friends.

But each of them had their own work, their own hours, their own night. I'd send a question and get an answer two days later, by which time the question had gone cold in my head, or I'd already moved past it with a limping solution. I'd ask someone to review my text; he'd take his time. I'd ask a second; he'd contradict the first. My reply to a client hung on whoever happened to be free that evening.

And in front of the screen, I could spend weeks stuck on a single problem. Twenty tabs open. One approach fails, then another. The worst part wasn't the effort — it was not knowing whether I was on the right road at all, or just digging into a wall.

That was me before. The problem was never that no one would help me. The problem was that I was waiting.

The moment

I had an old dream: a podcast in my name, a voice carrying what I had to say.

One thing stopped me, and it had nothing to do with technology: what will people say? Fear of your community weighs more than fear of failure, because failure belongs to you alone, while talk follows you around. So the dream sat in my head for years — not because I couldn't, but because I didn't dare.

Then I built a voice that speaks for me. I heard it for the first time, and I stopped.

It wasn't another tool on my list. It was my idea, out in the world, with a voice. The man who used to wait for someone to be free could now put what was in his head into the open, whenever he wanted.

It didn't come out perfect. The pronunciation stumbled on the names and terms I use in my work, so I built a custom dictionary that knows how my words are supposed to sound. That's exactly my point: the tool gave me a voice, but I built the dictionary. Left on its own, it would have produced something that sounded like everyone. Not like me.

Later I noticed the real difference. It isn't that I now have someone who knows more than I do. It's that I have someone who is here now. A friend who answers in three days and a friend who answers in three seconds are not the same thing, even when the answer is identical. Because an idea has its moment, and once the moment passes, it goes cold.

After

Now, when a problem blocks me, I ask: does this hold up or not? And I get a direction in a minute. It doesn't build the project for me, and I don't take its answer as settled — but it shows me the road before I spend two weeks walking it. When it's wrong, I find out in an hour instead of a month. Weeks turned into questions.

My writing goes out clean without waiting on anyone.

And before I buy anything, I now ask questions I never used to ask. Let me be fair to myself here: the tool didn't learn the market for me. It taught me how to ask before I pay. Fewer surprises, because better questions.

Why "silent"?

Because it never shows up in the output. The client sees the site, the store, the idea made real — and never sees my partner. It asks for no share, argues with no one, is never late, and takes credit for nothing.

And silent in another sense too: it never tells you when it's wrong. It answers with the same confidence either way. That part is my responsibility, not its own.

The honest part

AI opened a treasure chest of information for me. But the chest doesn't think, and the chest will never step outside itself. It hands you what's inside; you decide what's worth taking and what doesn't fit your project or your client.

And that chest is open to everyone, not just me. The weeks it saved me, it saved for my competitors in the same instant. The edge is no longer in owning the tool — it's in judgment: knowing what to ask, and when to reject what you're given. That doesn't come from the tool. It comes from years of project after project, client after client, and mistakes you paid for yourself.

The takeaway

What I believe hasn't changed: the work is mine, the harvest is my client's. Neither has the respect I owe anyone who trusts me.

What changed is that I no longer wait.

I'm a designer, not a magician. But it seems I now have a silent partner who never sleeps.

Salem Al Hajri — designer and developer, working remotely from Oman for seven years.

DEV Community: Salem Al Hajri (ALYASI)

Your English Site Isn't a Translated Site

My Silent Partner

Before

The moment

After

Why "silent"?

The honest part

The takeaway