Code as Craft

People are passionate about where they live. At Etsy we need to keep track of lots of different locations, such as buyers’ billing and shipping addresses and sellers’ shop locations. As Etsy continues to expand internationally we wanted to provide better localization and translations for our location place names. We determined that the best way […]

By: Diego Alonso As we mentioned in Teaching Etsy to Speak a Second Language, developers need to tag English content so it can be extracted and then translated. Since we are a company with a continuous deployment development process, we do this on a daily basis and as an result get a significant number of […]

By: Lacy Rhoades & David Bernal Etsy offers a lot of items from a lot of sellers worldwide. Now since we’ve started to better support our international members, this means Etsy also comes in a variety of languages. We rely heavily on search engines to bring people looking for something unique to our Sellers and […]

An often-overlooked (or underestimated) aspect of internationalizing a website is determining how to localize for a given visitor.  You might detect that a visitor is “German” because their Geo IP locates them as connecting from Germany, or because their browser accept language is German.  But what if your detection is faulty… they’re using a shared […]

By: JM Imbrescia & Corey Losenegger As an Engineer, it can be quite daunting planning how to translate a website from English into another language. We just finished teaching the Etsy website to speak German, and wanted to share some tips. When preparing to translate the site, there are a few challenges to think through: […]

There’s nothing more frustrating than not understanding what’s right in front of you, as the non-German speakers among us might surmise after watching the clip from comedy programme Loriot above.  At Etsy, we’ve been working to build the world’s first truly global marketplace, allowing buyers and sellers to connect and have meaningful exchanges, regardless of […]