Snapdeal would be available in 11 new regional languages by 26th January 2016. Apart from English, the e-commerce portal can be accessed in Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Assamese and Punjabi.
The company plans to reach an additional 130 million smartphone users in India, thus making digital commerce accessible to all.
Commenting on the launch, Rohit Bansal, Co-Founder, Snapdeal said , “Less than 2% of the Internet’s content is available in Indian languages. It’s such an acute dilemma. Our decision to go multi-lingual is driven by the feedback that we have received from our users.”
Snapdeal’s Customer Care however would continue to offer language support in 5 languages only. Seller experience and subsidiaries like FreeCharge and Shopo will have to wait too.
“We’ll prioritize based on the data that we collect from consumer experience and feedback. As new consumers join our portal, we’ll roll out 12, and then 22 languages. Right now we’re focused on the Jan 26th deadline”, Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal said.
Snapdeal’s Grammar Engine that made this possible is based on algorithm and human curation, Vikas Banga, VP Engineering, User Growth explained. “We started with a team of around 8. Currently we have about 20 people working on Project Bharat. We have one language expert for each language, and we feed in corrections based on observation.”
The new experience would be available across all platforms on Snapdeal.
Image credit: Indiatimes