Is It Out of Scope? — Web development
Is translating the site into another language out of scope for a web development project?
Yes, unless internationalization was explicitly scoped from the start — adding a second language after a single-language build usually means retrofitting i18n infrastructure the original architecture didn't include.
The build was architected for one language: strings hardcoded or loosely organized rather than pulled from a translation layer, URLs without a locale prefix, no locale-switching UI. A request to "add [language]" post-build isn't a content task — it's retrofitting internationalization (i18n) infrastructure that wasn't part of the original architecture: extracting every string into translatable resources, building locale routing, adding a language switcher, and re-testing the whole site under the new locale.
Is it out of scope?
Yes, if i18n wasn't scoped from the start — which it usually isn't unless the client specified multi-language requirements up front. Retrofitting translation infrastructure into a single-language codebase is a meaningfully larger task than translating a document, and the SOW's feature list is the reference point for whether it was ever included.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Deliverables clause→ — If multi-language support isn't named as a feature in the deliverables list, it wasn't part of what was built or quoted.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
The build was scoped and architected for [language] only — the SOW doesn't list multi-language support as a feature. Adding a second language means retrofitting a translation layer and locale routing, which is a real infrastructure change, not a content swap. I'd like to scope this properly with an estimate rather than quote it off the cuff — can we set up a call to talk through which pages need it first?
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow flags this outside_scope by checking whether internationalization appears in the contract's extracted feature list at all — if it doesn't, the request is treated as new infrastructure work regardless of how the client phrases it, and the explanation calls out that it's an architecture change, not a translation task, so the account manager can set expectations about timeline as well as cost.