How We Built a Multilingual Marketing Site with Breakdance and Falang

When we decided to expand our reach to international markets, we faced a common challenge: how do you maintain a beautiful, high-performance website while serving content in multiple languages?

After testing several solutions (Weglot: don’t like the recurring payments; Prisna: dont like the automatic translation), we landed on a combination that just works: Breakdance Page Builder for design and a modified version of Falang for translations without a subscription and with AI translations (BYOK!)

Why Breakdance?

Breakdance has become our go-to page builder for several reasons:

• Clean output — No bloated code, just lean HTML and CSS
• Visual editing — Design pages without touching code
• Dynamic data — Pull content from anywhere in WordPress
• Speed — Pages load fast because there’s no JavaScript framework overhead

But Breakdance stores content differently than the classic WordPress editor. This is where most translation plugins fail.

The Multilingual Problem

Traditional translation plugins expect content in post_content. Breakdance stores everything as serialized JSON in post meta. This breaks compatibility with nearly every translation solution we tried.

We needed something that could:

1. Scan Breakdance’s JSON structure for translatable strings
2. Extract text, URLs, and image paths
3. Present them in a simple translation interface
4. Serve the right content based on visitor language

Our Modified Falang

The standard Falang plugin doesn’t support Breakdance out of the box. So we built our own integration.

Our modified version takes a different approach. Instead of duplicating entire posts for each language, it stores translations as metadata. This means:

• One post, multiple languages — No content duplication
• Smaller database — Translations are lightweight
• SEO-friendly URLs — /en/about/, /nl/over-ons/, /de/uber-uns/
• Native Breakdance support — Scans builder JSON and extracts every translatable string

How It Works

When you edit a Breakdance page, it automatically parses the builder’s JSON and presents a clean side-by-side interface:

AI-Powered Translation

Manual translation is time-consuming. That’s why we added OpenRouter AI integration. With one click, you can translate any string using:

• GPT-4o
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet
• Or any model available on OpenRouter

The AI preserves HTML markup, understands context, and delivers natural-sounding translations. It’s not a replacement for professional translators on critical content, but it’s a massive time-saver for the hundreds of UI strings scattered across a marketing site.

Want Access?

We’re currently running this modified Falang with Breakdance support on our own sites. It’s still in beta, but it’s stable and we use it in production.

If you’re interested in getting access to the plugin, reach out to us. We’re open to selling the beta version to others who need Breakdance + multilingual support. Get in touch!