Recover in your customer's language,
without translating a template

THE TRANSLATED TEMPLATE

Why translating a template is not enough

A translated template is still a template: it carries the choices of its source language, and those choices do not survive the trip.

• Formality. Familiar or formal address, honorifics: the source language settles it for every other one, and gets it wrong in half the markets.
• Length. A sentence that fits an English subject line overflows in German, and empties out in Japanese.
• Concrete references. Currency, date format, units, the usual delivery method: translated word for word, they stay those of the source market.
• Maintenance. Every edit to the source template has to flow down into all its translations, and the gap sets in with the first one that is missed.

THE PROCEDURE

How to do it

1. 1

   Read the language where it already is

   The order carries its language and its market. Nothing to ask the customer, nothing to guess from their address.

2. 2

   Decide before writing

   Language does not change the decision to write or stay silent. A cart not worth a message is not worth one in any language.

3. 3

   Write in the language, do not translate into it

   The message is written for that cart and in that language, with the store's writing register and its brand rules, the same everywhere.

4. 4

   Keep a single sequence

   One sequence for every market, stopping as soon as the customer replies or buys. No duplication per country.

ONE CART, TWO CUSTOMERS

What it looks like

Same store, same product, two markets. The two messages are not translations of each other.

The first one uses the familiar form, the second the formal one, and neither mentions a country that is not its own. A translated template would have settled that once for both.

THE LANGUAGES

The ones a message can be written in

The list is served from the product configuration, not copied by hand. It is available on every plan.

• 🇫🇷French
• 🇬🇧English
• 🇪🇸Spanish
• 🇩🇪German
• 🇮🇹Italian
• 🇵🇹Portuguese
• 🇳🇱Dutch
• 🇯🇵Japanese
• 🇰🇷Korean
• 🇨🇳Chinese
• 🇸🇦Arabic
• 🇷🇺Russian
• 🇵🇱Polish
• 🇸🇪Swedish
• 🇩🇰Danish
• 🇫🇮Finnish
• 🇳🇴Norwegian
• 🇨🇿Czech
• 🇸🇰Slovak
• 🇭🇺Hungarian
• 🇷🇴Romanian
• 🇧🇬Bulgarian
• 🇭🇷Croatian
• 🇸🇮Slovenian
• 🇹🇷Turkish
• 🇬🇷Greek
• 🇺🇦Ukrainian
• 🇹🇭Thai
• 🇻🇳Vietnamese
• 🇮🇩Indonesian
• 🇲🇾Malay
• 🇮🇳Hindi
• 🇧🇩Bengali
• 🇮🇱Hebrew
• 🇦🇩Catalan
• 🇱🇹Lithuanian
• 🇱🇻Latvian
• 🇪🇪Estonian

Languages, plan by plan

WHERE THIS FAILS

The limits, written down

• The language missing from the order. Some stores do not pass it along: the message then goes out in the market's main language, which is still a default.
• The customer buying in a language that is not theirs, while travelling or out of habit. The data is right, the conclusion can be wrong.
• Languages outside the list above, and regional variants a store separates while the order does not.

WHAT TO REMEMBER

Three sentences

• Translating a template spreads the source language's choices, including where they are wrong.
• The customer's language is store data, not a guess to make from their address.
• Writing in the customer's language does not change the decision to write at all.

Read the decision method, limits included

WHAT IT RESTS ON

Language is data, not guesswork

Everything above rests on public references: language and market already exist in the order data, language tags have a standard, and local formats have a repository.

• Shopify

  The Order object in the Admin GraphQL API

  An order carries `customerLocale`, the language the customer ordered in. That is the data the first step of the procedure rests on: read the language where it already is.

• Shopify

  Markets, selling in several countries

  The reference for the market an order was placed on. Market and language are two different things, and confusing them means writing in English to a Belgian customer.

• IETF

  RFC 5646, tags for identifying languages

  The standard separating a language from a regional variant. It explains why one template per language fails wherever the variant matters, from Portuguese in Portugal to Portuguese in Brazil.

• Unicode

  Unicode CLDR, the locale data repository

  Date, number and currency formats and plural rules, per locale. This is what word-for-word translation leaves behind: the concrete markers stay those of the original market.