Amazon is one of the biggest retailers in the world and second only behind Flipkart in India. There’s a huge opportunity in India for online retailers as more and more people get access to the internet. The problem is many of these retailers are available only in English, a language that just a 10th of the population in India speaks. Amazon is hoping to grow by adopting India’s dominant language, Hindi.
Amazon says the level of trust increases when a customer can shop in their native language. But it wasn’t easy to translate such a massive website. They started the process 2 years ago by running the site through a language translation algorithm. The result was not good, so they turned to real humans to translate key listings and the purchases process. They then used those versions to train the algorithms to do a better job with the mass translation.
Users will be able to choose Hindi as a language, but we’re not sure if it will be the default. It’s still a big step for Amazon and India as a whole. Even Flipkart is not available in Hindi. If Amazon wants to make a push as the number one retailer in the country, this could be a big step. If you’re serious about being successful in a country like India, you should embrace the language.
Source: The New York Times
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