As non-native English speaker I've been involved with multilingual development projects for over a decade, first leading the PHP documentation and website teams and then on Drupal since 2003. The open-source, community-built Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative, which I am currently leading, focuses on making Drupal the base system more multilingual-friendly and includes huge user facing improvements and many more backend technology developments and unification. This presentation will address how multilingual data is modeled in a practical implementation (software translation, different content models, workflow basics, etc.), how a predominantly English/American focused development team be persuaded to include multilingual features, and how to integrate multilingual tool development with open source methods (e.g., crowd-sourcing software translation, pluggable translation integration systems). Taken together, these issues show how software approaches to multilingual needs can be built right into one of the world's leading content management systems.