Metzee is in five Indian languages and English: Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.
That is not a feature we are proud of so much as a condition we had to meet before the thing made sense at all.
The quiet filter
An English-only marketplace does not announce that it is excluding anybody. It just develops a certain kind of seller — urban, younger, comfortable writing a product description in a second language — and everybody concludes that is who makes things.
It is not. The weaver who has done this for thirty years, the potter whose daughter set up his phone, the embroiderer whose work is better than anything on the front page: all of them hit the same wall, and the wall is a form they cannot read.
Translating the boring parts
Anybody can translate a homepage. The work is in the parts nobody shows off:
- the error when a payment fails
- the difference between "ready to post" and "posted"
- what a buyer agreed to when they chose to collect
- the email that says your payout is on its way
Those are the sentences that decide whether somebody trusts the app with their livelihood. Getting them wrong in Tamil and right in English means the app is only honest in English.
When something reads wrong
A translation can be present and still be wrong: a word that means something else in context, a line that runs off a button, a sentence that is formal where the English was plain. We find some of these ourselves and we miss others, because the only person who can see a bad sentence is the person reading it.
If a screen reads oddly in your language, tell us — support@metzee.com. Say which screen, and what it should have said.
What is still in English
The Console — the staff tools we use to run the marketplace — is English only, and will stay that way for now. It has no sellers and no buyers in it, and the effort is better spent on the five that do.
If you make things and have been putting this off because of the language, start here.