Why I translated this portfolio into 4 languages

Translating a personal portfolio into four languages (French, English, Spanish, German) is real work — every section, every button, every error message has to exist in all four versions, with no text left hard-coded somewhere. Here's why I made that choice.

A strategic choice above all

I don't limit myself to opportunities in France: I'm also aiming for international work, especially in digital accessibility, where the needs and the certifications have a genuinely global reach. A French-only portfolio closes the door on a large share of those opportunities before the first contact even happens.

How it's built technically

The site is built in Next.js, with a dedicated route structure per language (/en, /es, /de, with French as the default at the root). Each language has its own strictly typed content file — it's impossible to miss a translation without the build flagging it at compile time.

Each page also exposes the right technical tags for international SEO: hreflang attributes to tell Google which pages are equivalent across languages, a multilingual sitemap, and an html lang attribute that changes dynamically depending on the language being displayed.

The direct link with accessibility

This is a detail often overlooked: the HTML lang attribute isn't just a technical detail for search engines. A screen reader uses it to choose the correct pronunciation. A site stuck with lang="fr" while displaying the English version will have its English text read with a French accent and intonation — unreadable for someone with low vision who depends on speech synthesis.

Getting this exact detail right on this site is part of the accessibility work I describe in my article about WCAG certification.

What it taught me

Translating a site all the way through forces a level of rigor you don't expect going in: every new section added must immediately exist in all four languages, or the site ends up with gaps. It's a discipline that connects directly to accessibility: thinking of everyone from the design stage, not patching it in afterward.