Design debt does not arise from poor craftsmanship or lack of skill. It arises from design decisions that are optimized for a single-language context. In monolingual projects, certain shortcuts appear efficient: fixed layouts, text embedded directly into visuals, or logic tied to visible strings. These decisions often reduce upfront effort and speed up delivery.

E-learning content is frequently designed with a single source language in mind. When this content is later localized, translation does not introduce instability. Instead, it exposes assumptions that were never tested beyond the original language.