Online marketplace Snapdeal will now be available in multiple languages to enable millions of Indians overcome language barriers and shop online in their preferred regional language. Starting on Tuesday, Snapdeal’s user interface on the mobile will be available in Hindi and Telugu.
From 26th January 2016, Snapdeal will be available in English and in 11 different regional languages—Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Assamese and Punjabi. Snapdeal expects to reach an additional 130 Million smart phone users in India with this move, who use internet in regional languages, thus making digital commerce now accessible to all.
Called 'Project Bharat' , Snapdeal’s multilingual user interface has been developed on the basis of the feedback it received from both its buyers and sellers. A multilingual project team was created within Snapdeal to ensure a consistent user experience in each language. To deliver a seamless shopping experience in all languages, Snapdeal developed a Grammar Engine to ensure an error free translation.
A significant percentage of users opt for Hindi and other regional languages to speak to their customer care representatives. With this multilingual platform, these customers can now shop in their native language. The platform allows users to pick the language of their choice for browsing, for payments and for order tracking.
The multilingual platform is built on top of Snaplite, Snapdeal’s website for mobile browser, which is 85 per cent lighter and consumes less bandwidth. This means that not only is it in the language of the regions, it also consumes 85 per cent less bandwidth and loads in 1/4th the time of most other mobile sites.
“Customers are at the heart of everything we do and we are excited about using technology to make the experience more authentic for our users. India’s linguistic diversity is a huge opportunity to expand the market to include those users who would prefer to engage online in their native languages," says Rohit Bansal, Co-founder of the company.
