When we set out to build Respondo, multilingual support wasn't an afterthought — it was a core requirement. Businesses in the UAE, where we're based, deal with customers who speak Arabic, English, Hindi, Urdu, and dozens of other languages daily.
The challenge
Most customer service tools treat translation as a bolt-on feature. They run text through a translation API and call it done. This approach fails in practice because customer service conversations are full of context, slang, and domain-specific terminology that generic translation can't handle.
Our approach
Respondo uses language-specific models that understand the nuances of each supported language. When a customer writes in Arabic, the system doesn't translate to English, process, and translate back. It understands and responds in Arabic natively.
This matters for response quality. A customer asking about a "return" in a retail context gets a different response than one asking about "return" in a financial context. Language-specific models capture these distinctions naturally.
The design system
Building the UI to support 30+ languages, including RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew, required rethinking our entire design system. Every component needed to work in both LTR and RTL layouts. Every text field needed to handle variable-length strings gracefully.
We settled on a constraint-based design system where components define their spatial relationships rather than fixed positions. This approach scales to any language without manual adjustment.