Walk into any of the restaurants, clinics or realty offices we work with in Calgary and you’ll hear two languages before you reach the counter. Their websites need to work the same way — and that’s a design problem, not a translation problem.
A “translate” widget bolted onto an English site produces something nobody chose: machine-phrased Korean, broken layouts, and search engines that can’t tell what the page is about in either language. A bilingual site is something else entirely.
Two scripts, two rhythms
Hangul and Latin type behave differently. Korean blocks are denser and more uniform in height; English words vary wildly in length and shape. A headline that sits perfectly in English can look cramped or sparse in Korean at the same size.
Practically, that means choosing type families that carry both scripts well, testing every headline and button in both languages, and letting line-height and letter-spacing differ per language instead of forcing one rule on both. Word-breaking matters too — Korean breaks anywhere by default, which can orphan a single syllable on its own line unless you set keep-all breaking for headings.
Decide what “bilingual” means for the business
Not every page needs both languages. A menu almost always does. A long legal page may not. We map this with the owner up front: which pages carry both languages fully, which lead in one and summarise in the other, and which audience each entry point serves.
The language toggle deserves the same care. It belongs where eyes go first — the header, not the footer — labelled in the target language (한국어, not “Korean”), and it should keep the visitor on the page they were reading, not dump them back on the home page.
Search happens in both languages too
Korean-speaking customers search in Korean. If your site only carries English text, you are invisible to half your audience even when they’re looking for exactly what you sell.
The technical side is unglamorous but essential: proper hreflang annotations so search engines pair the language versions, per-language titles and descriptions, and content actually written — not machine-generated — in each language.
None of this is exotic. It’s the same craft as any good website, applied twice with respect for both audiences. That’s the difference between a site that’s translated and a site that’s bilingual by design.