Internationalizing a Static Site Means Multiplying the Build
Date Published
Every locale a static site supports is, in effect, a full additional copy of every page that needs one — which means build time scales with the number of languages supported, not just the number of routes. A site that takes two minutes to build in one language can take considerably longer once it's generating the same routes in five.
The part that's easy to underestimate isn't the strings, it's the structural decisions underneath them: how routing represents locale in the URL, whether missing translations fall back silently or fail the build, how locale-specific formatting for dates and numbers gets handled consistently across every page type.
Teams that retrofit internationalization onto a site not built for it tend to hit the same wall: the content model assumed one version of everything, and every place that assumption was baked in has to be found and unwound one at a time.