startups don't translate their products, despite their teams/founders being polyglot
this is true especially among YC startups
for instance, i've seen YC-baked startups with European roots, but none of them offer product in their home language
does anybody have an explanation why this has happened?
in my experience, companies are more eager to work with you if you speak their language
I worked on an application aimed at Brazil and did not know any Portugese but worked closely (as a PHP dev) with the founder and the tester to iterate quickly and raise the success rate for the user registration process from 30-something to 80-something... With text messages in the HTML and not indirected.
Devs don't feel empowered to add or change messages if they have to go through multiple steps, get approval from a committee, create a new key, etc. What happens is that people reuse the wrong key, create duplicate keys, don't fix typos, ... The labor to do very simple things can be tripled.
For an "enterprise" app where nobody gets excited if text overflows its box it is one thing, but for a consumer app where people have a choice, the negative impact on quality will mean users vote with their feet.
I think it's because i18n is expensive and difficult. In starting a new project, internationalization means you must include that feature from the beginning. Every word in a dialog box, every button, etc. must be coded so that it can be handled dynamically. This adds a tremendous amount of scaffolding to the program as well as creating a lot of work for the team. Many teams just aren't funded for this kind of work and so they focus on getting the project working in one language only. Often, the decision not to include i18n at the beginning means it will be difficult or impossible to add later, resulting in products that never grow beyond their home language.