When we built a multilingual catalogue for a vehicle export business — English, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic and Chinese — most of the work was not translation. It was the plumbing around it.
1. hreflang is easy to get wrong. Every page needs the full set of alternate links, including a self-reference, and the codes must match the language and region pairs you actually publish. A missing self-reference silently drops the whole cluster.
2. Arabic needs RTL at the layout level, not the string level. Direction belongs on the html element, and every icon that implies order — arrows, progress, breadcrumbs — has to flip.
3. Locale-specific pricing and dimensions. Unit systems, currency separators and number formatting vary enough that hard-coded strings break by the third market.
4. Keep the URL structure flat. /en/vehicles.html beats query parameters, both for crawling and for anyone reading analytics.
5. Static generation keeps it fast. The catalogue is static HTML with no client-side routing, which makes the hreflang cluster cheap to maintain.
The current iteration is live at China vehicle exporter if anyone wants to look at the structure.
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