At Shopify, the leading multi-channel commerce platform that powers over 600,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries, we aim at making commerce better for everyone, everywhere. Since Shopify’s early days, it’s been possible to provide customers with a localized translated experience, but merchants had to understand English to use the platform. Fortunately, things have started to change. For the past few months, my team and I focused on international expansion bringing new shipping patterns, new payment paradigms, compliance with local laws and much more to explore. However, the biggest challenge is preparing the platform for our translation efforts. I speak French. Growing up, I learned that things have genders. A pencil is masculine, but a feather is feminine. A wall is a he, but a chair is a she. Even countries have genders, too — le Canada, but la France. It’s a construct of the language native speakers learned to deal with. It’s so natural, one can usually guess the gender of unknown or new things without even knowing what they are.Did you know that in English, zero dictates the plural form? We’d say zero cars, car being plural. But in French, zero is always singular, as in, zéro voiture. Singular, no s. Why? I don’t know but each language has their quirks. Sometimes it might be obvious, like genders, or more subtle like a special pluralization rule.Shopify employs hundreds of developers working on millions of lines of code. For the past twelve years, we collectively hardcoded thousands and thousands of English strings scattered across all our products oblivious to our future international growth. It would be great if we could simply replace words from one language with another, but unfortunately, differences like gender and pluralizations force us to rethink established patterns.We had to educate ourselves, build new tools, and refactor entire parts of our codebase. We made mistakes, tried different things, and failed many times. But now, six months after we
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