A large publisher, whose primary content is in a language other than English, used GTranslate — a third-party proxy — to auto-generate translated versions of every article into six other languages. That gave them no editorial control over the translated content, and they wanted a native, CMS-managed multilingual setup instead. Two platform constraints shaped the work: RebelMouse's translation tooling assumed English as the source language, and the client's source language wasn't yet supported at all. On top of that, there was no alternate-links strategy in place, so decommissioning the third-party proxy without a plan meant every indexed translated URL — over a million of them — was a candidate to 404.

As solutions architect, I scoped what a native replacement needed to support: strict

The client's editorial team now manages translations natively inside RebelMouse, with full editorial control per language instead of an automated third-party pass. The redirect side never got resolved before launch: the client shut down GTranslate before the mapping between old and new URLs was complete, and those 404s — well over a million of them — are still outstanding on their end.