etzee

One screen is still in English

Three different reasons, and only one of them is a bug. How to tell, and how to report it.

The Metzee team15 Oct 20262 min read

Metzee's screens are translated into eleven languages besides English, and that coverage is checked mechanically — every line of interface text is proved to exist in every language before anything ships.

So English appearing where you expected your own language is one of three things, and they need different responses.

1. A seller wrote it

Not a bug, and not fixable. A listing title, a description, a store name and a chat message are in whatever language the seller typed them.

Translating a seller's own words would mean changing what they said about the thing they are selling, which is not something a marketplace should do to a description that functions as a promise.

So a Tamil interface with a Hindi listing inside it is normal. How to change your language

2. A server error message

This one is a real gap, and it is known. Some refusals that come back from the server are written as plain English strings rather than going through the translation system — so the checks that prove every screen is translated have never seen them.

The codebase keeps a tracked list of exactly these, precisely so they are not forgotten: bare English a buyer or seller can still be shown, usually at the worst moment, when something has gone wrong and they most need to understand why.

They are being worked through. If you hit one, reporting it genuinely helps — a screenshot tells us which one you met, and the list exists so they can be fixed rather than rediscovered.

3. The Console

The internal admin tooling is English only, deliberately. It is not a screen buyers or sellers see, so if you are looking at it you work here.

How to tell which you have

  • Inside a listing or a chat message? The seller wrote it. Nothing to report.
  • An error or a refusal — "could not", "not allowed", "try again"? Likely the known gap. Worth a screenshot.
  • An ordinary button, label or heading? That would be a genuine miss in the interface, and it is the rarest of the three because those are checked mechanically. Definitely worth reporting.

How to report it

A screenshot and which language you are using. That is enough — the screenshot identifies the string, and the language tells us whether it is missing or mis-shown.

If the whole app is in the wrong language

Different problem: your language setting. Profile → Preferences → Language & display. You may have been offered it at sign-up and skipped past it. How to change your language

More: in Urdu something is on the wrong side, eleven languages, language and your buyers.

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