A Polish user signed up, so I went from 2 languages to 21. How do you pick yours?
While browsing the new signups on my SaaS the other day, I spotted someone using the app in Polish. At that point the UI only supported Japanese and English.
That got me wondering how the big project management tools approach localization. Trello supports 21 languages, so I decided to support the exact same 21: Japanese and English, plus German, Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Czech, Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
What really caught me off guard was how weakly the number of speakers for a language tracks its actual use on the web. According to W3Techs, about half of all websites are in English, while Japanese comes in 4th at 4.9%. Chinese sits at just 1.3%, and Hindi is below 0.1%. Polish, at 1.8%, actually lands above Chinese.
Trello also blocks new account signups from Russia and Belarus because of sanctions, so I followed suit there too. Even so, I kept the Russian UI, since plenty of people outside those two countries use Russian.
How do you all decide which languages to support?
Replies
I picked mine from the stores rather than from a competitor: App Store Connect lets you localize into about 50 languages, so I did all of them, and then let search tell me which ones matter. Your Hindi number explains what I'm seeing in reverse. Hindi is below 0.1% of websites, and that's exactly why my Hindi, Marathi and Bengali pages already get impressions, there's almost nothing else in those languages to compete with. So for a consumer app I'd almost pick languages by how empty the web is in them, not by how many people speak them. For a SaaS like yours, Trello's list is probably the safer bet, your users already work in those tools. Did the Polish user stay after the update?
@gbasovv Not yet, actually. I just added the languages today and I'm about to deploy them to production. Once it's live, I'm planning to email them directly. I'd be really happy if they're glad about it.
@hisashispace emailing them directly is a lovely touch, and writing that email in Polish would make the point better than any changelog. I'd be curious whether they reply. Good luck with the deploy!
@gbasovv Thanks George! Writing it in Polish is a nice idea. I'll let you know if they reply ☺️
Check which languages appear among people who finish onboarding and return, then test the whole signup and payment flow in those languages
A translated dashboard is less useful if validation errors and support emails still fall back to English
@al_kub Thanks! That part's covered already. The error messages from the server and the emails are translated into all 21 languages too, not just the screens.
An agent batching language files lost context mid-task and rebuilt a helper that already existed two files away, with a different name. It should never touch localization across the codebase in one pass.