Going global without the chaos: Multilingual content done right with Glide CMS

Multilingual versions of sites and apps are great ways to reach new audiences and grow engagement. Glide CMS simplifies multilingual content management, with automation, instant translations, local text-to-voice, SEO-friendly structures, and quick workflows which cut time and cost.

by Dina Husejnagić

Published: 16:26, 10 April 2025

Expanding into new markets is both exciting and challenging. Audience growth and revenue can quickly spring from a global presence, but to realise both you need to nail the big things, like defining your internationalisation strategy and addressing the operational challenges of delivering multilingual content. 

Skip these crucial steps and you risk making such a venture too expensive and ineffective, squandering the opportunity reaching global audiences represents.  

Great news, Glide CMS has you covered. A headless CMS built for publishers, media, and sports organisations, we know first hand the intricacies of meeting the needs of global audiences. 

Internationalisation is a wide-ranging topic that involves many decisions and business implications. In our latest article series, we're breaking it down to address the various aspects on a more digestible level, starting here with multilingual content and some of its trickiest challenges. 

Internationalisation vs multilingual

To start, it's important to understand the difference between internationalisation and multilingual. While these terms clearly overlap, they are not interchangeable. 

At its broadest, internationalisation is a series of strategic questions and business decisions related to being a potentially global brand. You can make decisions on internationalisation without providing multilingual content, but to be multilingual you have to think about internationalisation. 

Internationalisation stretches from the simplest step - which can mean having identical content on your existing site, but just in a different language - through to the most complex, i.e. fully separate businesses, domains, websites/apps, staff, commercial strategies, design/UX, and of course different content, design, SEO, URL structures, audience management, pricing, and more. 

And you can even do all those things without changing the language the content is written in. C'est complexe! 

Because our customers serve audiences around the globe, Glide CMS has a very powerful set of built-in internationalisation features which allow a granular approach to the internationalisation journey, including multilingual content delivery.

A CMS that speaks your language(s)

Now, onto multilingual content. On its face, delivering content in multiple languages is often one of the simpler things to make decisions about, but we caution - don't rush in. Haphazardly introducing multilingual content can result in ongoing costs and daily workflow impacts which "bigger" strategy decisions might not have.  

Making the delivery of multilingual content easy and efficient is a key outcome Glide CMS has focused on.

Many content businesses fall short in effectively serving global audiences because of clunky tech, tech which dictates your strategy because of its limits, rather than tech which promotes transborder expansion.

Old CMSs and disconnected systems force editors and developers into all sorts of workarounds and introduce major inefficiencies into workflows, leading to messy execution and lost time, engagement, and money. 

For a multilingual strategy to work, content teams need a CMS that enables their efforts without adding complexity or fear and adapts to their workflow needs, not the other way around.

Here we highlight the essential multilingual features a CMS should offer and how Glide CMS ticks those boxes.

Language support

Native language matters - not only to the audiences consuming content but for the editorial and content teams creating that content. In addition to delivering content in various languages, Glide CMS lets editors set the CMS interface to their preferred language making their day-to-day work more comfortable and things like training and onboarding easier. 

Out of the box, Glide supports a wide range of languages, both English (UK and US) and Spanish, as well as Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic in right-to-left (more on this below), and more. Need another language? Simply ask... because of Glide CMS’s SaaS architecture, we are regularly adding new fully-supported languages as well as those at customer request.  

Right-to-left language support

For teams publishing content in Arabic or other right-to-left (RTL) languages, most CMSs have no native support, or are super bespoke and cannot repeat the feat in the other direction.

Glide CMS handles this instantly, adjusting the interface and text alignment for RTL languages like Arabic, and ensuring a smooth, consistent experience with no additional setup needed from your team. Essentially, just switch a toggle, refresh your browser, and start writing.

Translation management, minus the pain

As noted above, the bigger challenges of multilingual content stem from the business complexities geared to match the needs of distinct global audiences. The bigger the organisation, the more complex things can get: different regions, different teams, different content priorities. 

Crucially, Glide CMS handles it all without forcing you to run multiple CMSs and databases. With Glide you can manage content in over 75 languages, making the delivery of content to global audiences much easier and cheaper.

Editors can create and filter content by locale within the same system, so regional teams see what’s relevant to them while leadership and development teams can access everything in one place. Use our role-based permissions to manage who sees what so teams can focus on their own markets without unnecessary clutter. 

Localisation - suiting content to local audiences

Being multilingual is not simply translating text word for word and calling it a day. Different audiences are interested in different things, especially when they are in different countries. As personalisation and targeting soar in importance, it has become crucial to meet local expectations. 

Language considerations

Setting aside all the non-lingual considerations, such as local design, site experience, SEO, URLs etc, even taking one article and automating its translation into another language asks many questions.

Is the original text translated verbatim, or is it adjusted to suit local lexicon and idioms? Even when dealing with like-for-like translations - which are the easiest to automate - the originals can be filled with terms and phrases which just won't work in another language. 

You may be fit as a fiddle or sick as a parrot, on cloud nine or under a cloud, but what you don't want to do is serve up nonsense to new readers who use entirely different cultural phrasebooks and assumptions of context. 

It's why most serious publishers give the bullet to full auto translations, and the red card to like-for-like content. They can both leave you looking a silly billy to new audiences.

Audience considerations

Let's use the example of an international football match. The "same" report on the same match is unlikely to appeal to both teams’ fanbases equally - unless it is so neutral that it didn't really target anyone. 

It's generally recommended that the more targeted the original content was, the more the alternate version will need changing to make sense after it has travelled. Automated translations can fail badly in this regard.

Even after the simplest and quickest translation, editors can transform the way an article resonates to different audiences with just minor changes to headline, tone, quote selections, image, or caption.

At their most complex, "translations" become completely different articles which share little except perhaps the result and some quotes.

Machines can do a lot to help, but humans find the balance.

Automatic by the people

LLMs can prove to be a handy fix to minimal translation needs, but are a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and if you are banning AI from your organisation for whatever reason, not much use to you.

At the sort of enterprise scale where speed and cost is critical, specialised Machine Learning services have proven much better, without the IP or hallucination issues for which LLMs have received much criticism. They are quicker to return results, cheaper and more accurate, and better protect your data and IP in transit, all while still allowing human oversight in the process. 

Fully external AI tools which generate 'post-publish' translations direct to sites are not recommended, for obvious reasons. They are ones which take content already published in language A, and ephemerally regenerate it on the fly at user request in language B directly on the page, and never trouble the CMS in doing so. It looks like a quick fix but risks all the reputational issues mentioned above, as well as plenty of others such as editorial culpability, and where your content and IP ends up.

Glide CMS's GAIA Translate feature lets editors translate content directly within the CMS instantly, allowing them to include or withhold complex structured data from translation, and also to preview and amend it fully, all without having to hop across third-party services or worry about content and IP being harvested. More importantly, GAIA Translate can do it all within the critical internationalisation framework so that the translation is the last and simplest part of your business rules around international publishing.

Editors review and refine AI-generated translations within the CMS before publishing, ensuring accuracy and authenticity. The result? Faster workflows without sacrificing quality.

Text-to-speech in language and accent

Text-to-speech on your main site in your original language isn’t just about accessibility - though it’s a big plus -  it can also be a great way to reach new audiences and tap into the booming demand to listen on the move and make your content more engaging.  

With GAIA Voice, users can instantly generate audio versions of articles not just in multiple languages, but with targeted local dialects and accents too.

Additionally, set granular preferences within your chosen languages for tone and gender to better target different audiences or treat certain content types differently from others: while an upbeat tone may be right for a story about celebration, it probably isn't what you want for something sombre or serious.

Don't get lost: SEO and URL structures

Managing multilingual content is just as much about ensuring your content gets found by search engines and audiences in ancillary markets as it is in your main market.

Critical to doing multilingual SEO well is the ability to fully tailor URLs and metadata for different locales and giving it the same complex metadata as anything else. This of course includes things like meta titles, social media metadata, and localised keywords. 

Arguably the most crucial first step to achieving high rankings is ensuring your content is properly categorised in the first place. Glide CMS simplifies content categorisation by effective use of taxonomies, which drive key parts of article metadata and content distribution, and to continue the theme, localised translated taxonomies can also be attached exclusively to localised content, such as articles, collections, and galleries. 

Another key factor in multilingual SEO is having a URL structure that reflects the locale. Glide's routing system makes it easy to implement custom slugs for each locale, such as /en/ for English content or /es/ for Spanish content, so search engines can correctly identify and index content based on the target audience.

Delivering multilingual content is just the tip of the internationalisation strategy iceberg. Stay tuned for more in our internationalisation series. 

To learn more about the language capabilities and internationalisation tools found within Glide CMS, or to get a demo, connect with a Glide product specialist.