Non-English Characters in URLs: Transliterate or Keep?

Titles in many languages contain accented letters such as é, ü and ñ, or entire scripts such as Arabic, Cyrillic or Chinese. You have two options for slugs: transliterate them into plain Latin letters or keep the original characters.

What happens behind the scenes

URLs were originally limited to a small set of ASCII characters. Other characters are converted with percent-encoding, which represents each byte of the UTF-8 character as a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits:

• café becomes caf%C3%A9
• A short Arabic or Chinese word can become dozens of characters of encoded text.

Modern browsers display the original characters in the address bar, but when the URL is copied into an email or document, people often see the encoded version.

Option 1: Transliterate

Convert characters to their closest plain-letter equivalents: café to cafe, straße to strasse, søster to soster.

Pros: short, universally readable, no encoding issues. Cons: may look odd to native speakers and loses some meaning, especially for non-Latin scripts.

Option 2: Keep native characters

Use slugs such as /café-recettes or slugs in the local script.

Pros: natural for local audiences; search engines understand them. Cons: long encoded URLs when shared, and potential problems with older systems.

Recommendations

• Latin-based languages with accents: transliteration is usually the practical choice.
• Non-Latin scripts for a local audience: native characters are reasonable, and many local sites use them, but test how links look when shared.
• International or mixed audiences: transliterated or English slugs are simplest.

The slug generator transliterates accents by default. Switch off Convert accents to keep Unicode letters in the slug.

Frequently asked questions

Should I transliterate URLs?

For Latin-based languages, transliterate URLs: accented characters in URLs become plain letters (é to e). Our tool does this automatically. To keep local language slugs, switch that option off.

How should multilingual URLs be organized?

Multilingual URLs are usually organized in a subfolder per language (/fr/, /de/) or a subdomain. Use hreflang tags to tell search engines which version serves which language.

Can I put emoji in a URL?

A URL with emoji technically works because browsers encode it, but it becomes a long encoded string when shared. Avoid emoji in slugs.