Case study · Bilingual platform
Dom / Uri-jip — a Russian-Korean housing platform
RU / KO
the whole content set flips, not just the menu
Cyrillic + Hangul
one licensed font family, no missing glyphs
Live
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Challenge
On a service for people settling in a foreign country, a half-translated interface is not an inconvenience but a credibility problem — a language toggle that only swaps the navigation tells a visitor the rest of the product was not built for them.
Solution
Every piece of text carries both languages and a language class on the document body decides which one is set at reading size and which is set as the secondary line, so a single toggle flips listings, guides, badges, and body copy together rather than only the interface chrome.
Results
A bilingual platform without the usual failure — no screen where one language quietly stays fixed, and no missing glyphs where Cyrillic, Hangul, and Latin appear in the same line.
- Client
- Self-initiated studio project
- Scope
- Bilingual platform · listings and guides
- Stack
- Next.js · React · bilingual typography
Bilingual is a trust feature, not a language feature
Someone finding housing and tracking a visa in an unfamiliar country reads a partly translated screen as a signal about the whole operation. The common shortcut — translate the menu, leave the listings and guides in one language — says quite clearly that the second audience was an afterthought. This build treats the toggle as a promise: press it and the hero, the listing cards, the living guides, and the badges all turn over, with prices, registration numbers, and timestamps left as language-neutral data so nothing has to be translated that should not be.
Three scripts on one line, and no flags
Cyrillic, Hangul, and Latin appear together constantly on a service like this, and the default outcome is missing glyphs or three fonts fighting each other. A single family covering all three is loaded properly so the page renders as one voice, and layouts are tuned for the extra width Russian text takes, so buttons and badges do not break when the toggle is pressed. The language switch is labelled РУС and 한국어 as text rather than with flag icons — a large share of Russian-speaking residents are from Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, and a flag is a country, not a language.
Domain trust signals in the right vocabulary
What makes a housing platform believable in this market is specific and unglamorous: a verified-listing badge, an agency registration number a visitor can check, and a visa countdown calendar that treats a deadline as the thing it actually is. Those were placed as first-class elements rather than footnotes, in the vocabulary each audience uses. This is a self-initiated studio project — we set the brief and held it to production standards — so the listings carry demo content; the bilingual architecture underneath it is the part built to ship.
Building for two language audiences and want the toggle to mean it? That is the part we would show you first.
sww@celis.co.kr