When we said we were adding Spanish, people assumed it was a weekend of running strings through a translation service. We assumed something close to that too. We were both wrong. Talking to yourself about anxiety is one of the most culturally loaded things a language does, and the gap between a correct translation and a true one is enormous.
The register problem
English self-talk in a wellness app trends informal and direct: "You've got this." "That thought isn't a fact." Drop that straight into Spanish and it can land as either cold or oddly chipper, depending on the region. Spanish carries the warmth and the seriousness of the moment in different places — in the choice between tú and usted, in diminutives that soften a hard sentence, in a rhythm that does not map one-to-one onto English brevity.
So the question stopped being "what is the Spanish word for this" and became "how would someone actually comfort themselves in Spanish." Those are not the same project. The second one is the one worth doing.
Three months on suggestion chips
The suggestion chips — the little starter thoughts you tap when you do not want to type — took the longest, which sounds absurd until you sit with them. A chip is a single line that has to feel like something a real person would actually think, in their own voice, unprompted. "Me preocupa el futuro" is grammatically perfect and emotionally flat. The version that works is more specific, more lived-in, and it varies by who is speaking.
We rewrote them from scratch rather than translating them, with native speakers, and then we threw most of the first draft away. The keepers were the ones that made a bilingual reader go "yeah, that's the thought," not "that's a correct sentence." Every chip in Spanish today is original writing, not a mirror of the English one.
What shipped
The whole experience is bilingual now — chips, reframes, the interface, and the reframing model itself, which writes in Spanish rather than thinking in English and converting. You can switch languages any time, and the app remembers. If your inner monologue runs in Spanish, or moves between two languages the way a lot of people's does, it should finally meet you there.
This is the issue I am proudest of, and the one that taught us the most about what we are actually building. A reframe is only as good as how natural it sounds in the voice you think in. We will keep applying that standard as more languages follow.
