Metzee is in eleven Indian languages and English: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
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.
Right to left
Urdu runs right to left, and that is not a font setting. The whole layout mirrors: the back arrow points the other way, a price sits on the other side of a row, a progress bar fills from the right.
We got this wrong in places and are still finding the places. If you use Metzee in Urdu and something sits on the wrong edge, that is a bug and we want it — support@metzee.com.
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 eleven that do.
If you make things and have been putting this off because of the language, start here.