I agree that managing multi language sites/apps adds a significant people cost. This is often woefully underestimated by the business. It's not the tech so much

I agree that managing multi language sites/apps adds a significant people cost. This is often woefully underestimated by the business. It's not the tech so much as the content. It's also hard to manage the content unless the development environment supports it. However, you can do yourself a huge favour by starting out using UTF8 across the board -- for Europe/US, in particular, and this sweeps up Arabic, Cyrillic, and a few others en route. Retro-fitting character encoding is laborious and, for the data, may not be viable (due to time, effort, and cost) if there is enough of it.