Building for Sinhala and English: what we learned shipping a bilingual product

Duqit runs fully in Sinhala and English — every page, every app, every customer-facing link. Getting there taught us lessons that no tutorial covers, because most localisation advice is written for languages Google's crawlers and font stacks already love. Field notes, for anyone building bilingual for Sri Lanka.

A translation nobody can find doesn't exist

Our first version switched language with a cookie. Elegant — and invisible: a crawler carries no cookies, so to Google our Sinhala site simply did not exist. The fix is boring and non-negotiable: every language needs its own URL (?lang=si works fine), each variant pointing at the other with hreflang tags. If you remember one technical thing from this article, make it that.

Write spoken Sinhala, not textbook Sinhala

Our first Sinhala copy was grammatically perfect and completely wrong. Literary verb endings — කරයි, ඇත, වේ — read like a school textbook; no Sri Lankan brand talks to customers that way. Real product copy uses the spoken register (කරනවා, තියෙනවා, පුළුවන්), keeps everyday English words in English (bill, order, stock — nobody says "ගිණුම්පත්‍රය"), and prefers short sentences. Read your copy aloud: if you would not say it to a customer across the counter, rewrite it.

Sinhala breaks layouts English forgives

Sinhala words run long and the script sits taller than Latin text. Buttons sized for "Save" explode on "සුරකින්න"; fixed-height headers clip diacritics. Practical rules: never fix button widths, test every layout in the longer language, and check your font stack actually covers Sinhala — a missing glyph renders as boxes on exactly the phones your customers own.

The WhatsApp trap

The nastiest bug we hit: text passed to WhatsApp through wa.me links gets its multi-byte characters corrupted by some desktop clients — Sinhala arrives as question marks. Since WhatsApp is the delivery channel for everything in Sri Lanka, our rule is now: URL-borne message templates stay ASCII, and Sinhala lives on the page the link opens, where it renders perfectly.

Bilingual is a market, not a checkbox

Sinhala search queries have a fraction of the competition of English ones, and a customer who reads your page in their own language trusts it more. That is why every Duqit app — from invitations to the tailor shop app — ships both languages, and why the effort keeps paying for itself.