How to Translate Your Portfolio Website (and Keep Your Art’s Voice Intact)

I’ve been living back and forth between Canada and Spain since 2017, and I’d say my Spanish is pretty solid. Solid enough that I am no longer able to tolerate a mediocre olive, solid enough to argue (gently, I’m Canadian) about politics, and solid enough that the employees at the market no longer speak to me in very slow Spanish as though I’m a golden retriever who has wandered in from abroad. Progress.

Why Translating Your Artist Portfolio Matters When You’re Living Abroad

My Format portfolio is the main way galleries, collectors, and fellow artists find me and my work. I lived in Granada for five years before moving back to Canada, so Spain isn’t new to me, but Zaragoza is. My husband, our dog Ruf, and I moved here in late 2025 without ever having visited the city before, which is either very brave or very bonkers depending on who you ask. I’m represented by galleries back in Canada, and that’s not changing, but I’m also starting over socially in a city where I know no one. I go to openings. I meet people. I have conversations that begin warmly, even if my website didn’t quite follow through on that welcome.

Spain’s art world is, unsurprisingly, largely in Spanish. And while plenty of people here speak English, “plenty” isn’t “everyone,” and more importantly, it isn’t the point. If someone is generous enough to be curious about my work, the least I can do is make my site legible to them in their own language. It felt like basic hospitality, honestly. If you’ve spent any time in Spain, you’ll know it is something people here take very seriously.

So I set about making my portfolio website multilingual, using Format’s integration with Weglot. And I want to tell you: it was genuinely easy.

How to Make Your Format Site Multilingual With the Weglot Integration

Start in Settings: Connect Your Weglot API Key and Choose Languages

The integration lives inside your Format account under Settings > Site.

You connect to Weglot with an API key, and from there, you choose your languages, set up how you want the language switcher to look, and Weglot does the rest. It scans your site, runs it through AI translation engines (it draws on DeepL, Google, and Microsoft, among others), and your site is multilingual. 

Add a Language Switcher Visitors Can Actually Find

The language switcher appears on your site automatically, by default in the lower right corner, and visitors can flip between versions without any fuss. The translated pages sit under their own URL structure, which is also good news for SEO if that’s on your radar.

What the Free Plan Covers (and When You Might Upgrade)

Weglot offers a free plan which covers up to 2,000 word views of translated content per month. If your site is high-traffic, you may eventually want to look at a paid tier, but for most artists just getting started with this, the free plan is a perfectly reasonable place to begin.

Auto-translate your portfolio in 110+ languages, then edit the phrases that need a human touch. Add Weglot to your Format site.

What AI Translation Gets Right and How to Maintain the Poetry of Complex Writing

Automated translation has come a long way. If you are an artist living abroad, or working in a country where your portfolio’s language creates a barrier, even a small one, the Format x Weglot integration is worth the very little time it takes to add to your site. The setup is fast, the free plan is generous, and the ability to edit and save your own translations means you keep creative control over how your work is presented.

When “Many Returns” Becomes “Muchas Devoluciones”: A Real Example

Here’s where I need to talk about my paintings.

I often name my work after songs or lyrics that feel connected to the moment I’m representing. I try to evoke something felt, something half-remembered, something that lives in the space between the image and the person looking at it. Titles like If you leave me, can I come too? or Inside the golden days of missing you or Articulate silences. They’re not descriptions. They’re more like emotional coordinates.

AI translation, bless its circuits, is very literal.

Because my Spanish is fluent, I could see immediately where the auto-translations were doing the job faithfully and where they were falling short. The words were right. The feeling was somewhere else. Take “Many returns”, a painting of my friend Meghan’s patio, one of my favourite places in the world, somewhere I’ve been returning to for decades. Weglot offered “Muchas devoluciones.” As in, product returns. As in, please bring your receipt. It doesn’t quite capture the sense of home that I was aiming for. 

How to Edit and Save Translations Manually in Weglot

This is where my favorite part of the Weglot integration came into its own: you can edit every single translation manually and save it. For poetic phrasing, the AI gives you a starting point, not a final answer. You go into the Weglot dashboard, find the strings you want to adjust, rewrite them, and save. Your edits stick. The next time someone visits the Spanish version of your site, they see your version, not the robot’s.

For my painting titles, this meant asking myself: what does this title mean, and how do I render that meaning in Spanish, rather than just the words? Sometimes the answer was close to the literal translation. Sometimes it wasn’t anywhere near it. It was a genuinely interesting creative exercise, a little like re-titling the work for a new audience; which in a way, I was.

Keep creative control over every translation. See how Weglot works with Format →

When to Get a Fluent Human to Review Your Translated Pages

If your target language isn’t one you speak fluently and your work—like mine—uses poetic language for titles or descriptions, I’d genuinely recommend asking a fluent friend or hiring someone for a one-off review of your translations once the setup is done. Platforms like Fiverr or Upwork make it easy to find a native speaker with arts or copywriting experience for exactly this kind of small, specific job. 

You do the setup, Weglot does the heavy lifting, and then a human, one who actually understands what Articulate silences is trying to do, does the finessing. That combination works really well for this kind of situation, and it’s a much smaller investment than you might think.

A Multilingual Site is a Small Change that Signals Commitment

I added the Spanish version of my site very recently, and I’ll be honest, I don’t have a tidy little success story to report yet. What I have is the quiet satisfaction of knowing it’s there. The gallerist I met at an art fair last month can now read about my practice in her own language if she’s curious enough to look me up. The painter I’ve been getting to know here can find the work, and the words around it, in Spanish. Whether they do or not is up to them but the door is open in a way it wasn’t before, and that feels like a great start as I work towards building my career up here. 

Zaragoza has a real arts community, and I am, let’s be honest, a Canadian woman who moved here and started painting pictures of her dog. Ruf wins hearts in any language, but it’s a little harder for me to find that connection. The willingness to meet people where they are linguistically, literally matters. It signals that you’re not just passing through. It’s a small act of commitment to the place you’ve chosen.

My site is now bilingual. Ruf, who has lived in two countries, understands three languages, and has never once complained about any of it, remains fluent in the most important language: being very cute and very friendly to everyone he meets.

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