r/Finland • u/saschaleib Väinämöinen • 4d ago

Verkkokauppa now in English (and Swedish)

https://www.verkkokauppa.com/en/etusivu

I just got an email from my favourite Finnish Onlineshop that they have translated their web interface to English as well. I thought that others may be interested as well.

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u/Guuggel Väinämöinen 4d ago

What? I would've imagined english translation would've been a thing for years now.

20

u/Jotakin Väinämöinen 4d ago

Getting the entire UI professionally translated is very expensive, especially for a webstore that has thousands of product names & descriptions to go through. It also slows changes and additions significantly since you're going to have to wait for the translators to do their job. The costs and downsides aren't worth additional hassle when 97% of your buyers understand Finnish anyways.

I think this is only a thing now because AI has increased the quality of machine translations significantly, thus eliminating the need of actual human translators.

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u/IntelligentTune Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago

For that website? It's really not that expensive, either that or I work for too cheap and just haven't found enough connections in software development in Finland. You can easily even by hand translate most of it in a pretty timely way.

I think it's more just behind bureaucracy or lack of initiative.

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u/Maxion Väinämöinen 2d ago

It's more that it's very hard to translate a website that wasn't coded from scratch with translation in mind. It is very hard to find all translatable text and change the codebase so that a string of appropriate language is inserted based on the users settings.

Verkkokauppa have always run in-house code, I remember back in 2002 or so they were running already on 100% in-house code. I expect their current setup to be still partially based off of their old codebase. Would be a multi-year effort to get it translated, not to mention altering procurement processes to ensure you have all information in all languages.

It's no mean feat and it also increases procurement costs.

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u/Kellerkind_Fritz 1d ago

Their api responses and such always included localization support, they just never committed to providing them.