Design tokens when your team speaks two languages

Product teams in Hanoi often mix Vietnamese shorthand in Slack with English Jira tickets. Tokens can become a battleground unless you anchor names to behavior, not dialect preferences.

We recommend pairing semantic names with a short glossary page that lives beside the library file. The glossary should list the token, its intent, and one example component — no essays.

In cohort critiques we saw fewer regressions when teams agreed on a single source language for code-facing names while allowing localized labels in the product separately. The separation keeps engineering diffs readable and still respects UI copy needs.

Finally, schedule a quarterly rename budget. Small adjustments beat frozen libraries that everyone secretly forks.