I Optimized SEO for 12 Languages — Here's What Doesn't Translate

Follow-up to I Built a Social Media Downloader and Got 169 Keywords Indexed in 7 Days . That one covered the initial indexing sprint. This one's about what happened when I tried to scale it to 12 languages. When I started expanding SaveKit beyond English, I did what most devs would do: handed my keyword list to a translator and called it a day. That was dumb. Cost me about two weeks of rework. Quick context SaveKit's a social media downloader — Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter/X, Reddit. 26+ pages total. I wanted to rank in 12 locales: EN, ID, PT, ES, TR, VI, JA, KO, DE, FR, HI, AR. That's 19 keyword targets per locale. 228 keywords that all needed independent validation. The stack is SvelteKit 2 + Svelte 5 on Cloudflare Pages, with each locale getting its own i18n JSON file for meta titles and descriptions. The autocomplete test that broke everything Before I touched any keywords, I did something simple: opened Google in incognito, set it to each target country, and sta