We run mimosa from Berlin and most of the people we work with are German. Having the site only in English was always slightly strange, so this year we fixed it. mimosaagency.com now runs in both.

Writing the German took a few days. Everything around it took considerably longer, and almost none of it was about words.

Page paths are their own decision

A translated page still lives at an English address unless you say otherwise. Your German visitor reads German copy at /services, because the path and the content are separate settings. Framer can translate paths, but that switch sits on its own, off by default, and it is easy to go a long time without noticing it exists.

We looked at it and left the paths in English. German search volume for our terms is small, the URLs are already indexed, and changing them means redirects for every page in two languages. That is a trade we can revisit later. The point is that it is a decision, and it is better made on purpose than by default.

Old translations go stale quietly

The awkward part of running two languages is that the first one keeps moving. Someone rewrites a paragraph in English, the German stays where it was, and nothing tells you. The page still looks finished. That is what makes it dangerous.

We found ours with a length ratio. Healthy German runs about 1.0 to 1.25 times the length of its English source, because the words are longer but the sentences are doing the same job. Anything above 1.6 is usually old, long German sitting underneath new, shorter English.

That single check surfaced around 350 strings that had drifted, including whole sections of body copy that had been rewritten months earlier. Word counts alone give you false alarms, because a correct translation is often simply longer. The ratio is the thing that separates length from rot.

What we would do again

Settle the URL question before translating anything, and keep an explicit list of what you do not want translated, named so the list survives the next export. Then build the drift check in from the beginning. It costs nothing to run and it is the only thing that will tell you the truth about your second language six months from now.