What it is
Bilingual and localized products need more than translated strings — they need layouts, type and interactions that hold up in both languages. Having worked in Japanese, I can design and build for it directly rather than through a handoff.
How I approach it
I spent six years living in Toyama, Japan, and have worked with Japanese clients since. That means I can take a project through design and front-end in both languages: handling the typography and line-breaking differences, catching the places where a layout quietly breaks when the copy changes language, and localizing with an ear for how the result actually reads.
Common problems I solve
- Layouts tuned for English that fall apart under Japanese text.
- Localization handled as a find-and-replace, with no one checking the result in context.
- Bilingual projects that need a designer and the translator to be the same person.
This is a smaller, specialist part of the practice — but for a bilingual project it can be the difference between a product that works in Japanese and one that merely contains Japanese.