Multilingual Text-Based Person Retrieval (TBPR) aims to retrieve individuals with texts in multiple languages. Despite its practical importance, it has been overlooked by existing research, which mainly focuses on English-only retrieval. The only prior attempt at multilingual TBPR suffers from (1) the absence of a large-scale, multilingual pretraining dataset and (2) a suboptimal model architecture for multilingual text encoding and cross-modal alignment, which employs a shared encoder that overlooks linguistic heterogeneity and relies on English as a pivot for cross-modal alignment, introducing English-centric bias. For this, we contribute MultiPedes, the first large-scale, pedestrian-centric multilingual pretraining dataset. It contains 10 million image-text pairs across four languages, constructed by a multilingual quality-aware data construction pipeline. We also propose ViSeLA (Vision-grounded Semantic Learning and Alignment), a novel framework featuring: (1) a semantic-aware multilingual learning module that extends the mixture-of-experts architecture by routing language-invariant semantics to specialized experts for improved multilingual feature learning; and (2) a vision-grounded cross-modal alignment module that employs a semantic probe to capture fine-grained semantics across modalities, enabling direct cross-modal alignment without relying on a pivot language. Extensive experiments on both multilingual and English-only TBPR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ViSeLA. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Flame-Chasers/ViSeLA

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