After opening an office in Singapore to best serve global customers in the APAC Region, VTEX is now glad to announce that our platform is available in Japanese!
From February 2021 onwards, VTEX users will find a fifth language option in the administrative control panel. In addition to the already existing Portuguese, English, Spanish and Romanian languages, the platform is now natively available in Japanese.
Consistent presence in the four corners of the world
Driven by the mission of being a global commerce industry leader, and aiming to deliver extraordinary value to its customers, the addition of the Japanese language option to the VTEX platform translates into a big step towards a bright future.
By listening to the operational needs and challenges of over 3.000 customers from around the globe and adding to the deep commitment to support their growth and expansion strategies, VTEX now can provide a seamless user experience for more than 25,000 people who use the platform as a daily basis working-tool to manage their ecommerce operation.
According to Vladimir Montanu, Head of Localization at VTEX, this is not only aimed at showcasing VTEX’s versatility and global reach, but also “highlights our dedication to becoming a global company that natively supports clients wherever they may be“.
Winning the challenges of being global
Japanese was the first non-Latin language implemented as a language option in the VTEX administrative control panel. To overcome this challenge, our product, localization and engineering teams had to tackle several unique technical barriers.
The first one was to understand and adapt the entire user interface to the 3 different character sets: hiragana, katakana, and kanji to be natively supported.
Moreover, it was necessary to map all features and modules (adding up to over 200 different pages) and identify the correct repositories and branches used throughout the architecture culminating in linking the different apps already running on our platform to the beta workspace to then get these ready for the production environment.
The addition of the Japanese language was possible due to the scalability of our architecture and the effectiveness of our process. VTEX supports a much larger variety of languages – over 20 – that overruns the administrative panel language setting throughout the entire shopping experience of the stores, from login to the search terms, the cart, checkout and orders placed page.
“Implementing Japanese as a language option on the VTEX platform, providing a fully localized dashboard, was a very important step since we know how incredibly important it is to have a native option. Japanese local businesses will be able to use the VTEX platform for local marketplaces or restaurants, for example, managing their ecommerce stores without any friction.” says Montanu.
Companies such as Motorola, that rely on VTEX technology to power their global commerce operations, are already leveraging this new language.
The “thinking global, acting local” mindset
The VTEX administrative panel currently supports six full language options (Portuguese, English, Spanish, Romanian, Italian and Japanese) that enhances the entire product experience not only through translations but on a cultural level taking into consideration the local setting of each culture.
Translating the entire experience of the product goes beyond just changing the language itself. To provide an accurate experience, the Localization and Product teams need to consider the regional peculiarities and technical requirements of a target locale.
As a next step, users can expect Korean, Dutch and French options to be unveiled soon Also, in addition to Japanese, VTEX is looking at Arabic, simplified and traditional Chinese language options as part of its global expansion.
