For a long time, multilingual websites were treated like side projects. You launched in English. Growth followed. Someone noticed traffic from other regions. Then, months later, translation entered the conversation, usually after complaints, drop-offs, or missed conversions. That pattern is quietly breaking. Today, being “multilingual” isn’t about expansion anymore. It’s about legitimacy. If your website doesn’t speak the user’s language from the start, many users simply assu

On most mornings, someone in India is calling a helpline. It could be a farmer checking a subsidy status. A senior citizen asking about a pension. A commuter is trying to understand a new rule that arrived overnight. What often stands between them and clarity isn’t access to technology. It’s language. India may be digitally ambitious, but it is linguistically complex. English-first systems work for a small slice of users. Everyone else navigates menus, IVRs, and messages that

If you listen closely to how India actually speaks, you’ll notice something important. Nobody talks in clean, textbook language. A customer might say, “Order cancel kari do, refund kab milega?”Or, in Gujarat, “Payment thayi gayu che, pan confirmation nathi aavtu.” This isn’t broken language. This is the language. Yet for years, customer experience systems have operated as if people speak in neatly separated boxes: English, Hindi, or Gujarati. Real conversations don’t work tha

Most D2C brands don’t ignore regional languages on purpose. They postpone them. English is sufficient in the early stages, mainly when growth is concentrated in metro markets. But the moment brands expand into Assam and the wider Northeast, cracks begin to appear. Traffic grows, installs increase, but conversion and retention rates do not move in the same direction. Language is often the invisible reason. Assamese users comprehend English but might not trust it. In moments of

English to Bengali translation is often underestimated. Bengali is widely spoken, deeply familiar, and already present across apps, banking messages, websites, and official communication. On the surface, it feels manageable. That feeling rarely survives real content. The moment teams start translating onboarding screens, payment updates, customer emails, policy text, or marketing copy, small cracks appear. A sentence feels odd. A phrase sounds stiff. Nothing is obviously brok

There’s a moment familiar to anyone who works across borders: you open a document, realise it needs to be understood by people who don’t share the same language. Suddenly, the most straightforward task feels heavier. A policy note for a branch office, a compliance update for a regulator abroad, or a training guide meant for teams in three countries, translation sits quietly behind all of it. In 2026, it’s no longer a courtesy. It’s infrastructure. And because the volume of do

No one brags about speed in 2026. What still causes tension inside content, product, and growth teams is something subtler. An uneasy feeling arises when English content is translated into Punjabi quickly, as something important often slips through the cracks. The words arrive on time, but the message feels… off. Flat. Sometimes, even untrustworthy. This is where the speed-versus-quality debate refuses to die. ​And maybe that’s because we’ve been framing the question the wron

A few years ago, English to Hindi translation was something teams planned around. You knew it would take time. You built buffers. Deadlines stretched a little. Everyone accepted it as part of the process. That quiet understanding is breaking down. Not because translators are slower or standards have dropped, but because the nature of content itself has changed. Translation is no longer a one-off task tied to a launch or campaign. It’s tied to constant updates. Products evolve

A translator once told me that moving a sentence from English into Marathi is a bit like carrying water in your hands; you think you’ve got it, and then a little meaning starts to slip away. Anyone who has tried even a simple line knows the feeling. English loves straight lines and crisp structure. Marathi, on the other hand, extends, bends, adds warmth, and sometimes conveys meaning through tone rather than grammar. A few weeks ago, I assisted a small business owner in revis

Nowadays, someone is likely to discuss expansion, new markets, regional rollouts, or user involvement in previously unexplored areas in any boardroom. However, language is one obstacle that subtly stymies many of these goals. Making people feel understood is much more critical than merely translating words. Translation was a behind-the-scenes activity for decades. After hiring a few linguists, you would transfer the documents and bide your time. It was effective until consist

At a busy bank branch in Madurai, an elderly customer stares at a tablet placed in front of her/him. The app is sleek. The features are powerful. The language is English. She/He looks up, confused, not because the process is complex, but because it isn’t speaking to her/him. This moment plays out quietly across India every day. BFSI has spent the last decade digitizing products. Digital transformation in banking, financial services, and insurance is no longer about apps, APIs

A curious pattern shows up when you watch shoppers navigate an online store. They’re quick to explore, quicker to abandon, and almost always decisive within seconds. But the moment the interface switches to a language they’re instinctively comfortable with, their behaviour changes. Scrolls slow down. Cart sizes inch up. Bounce rates drop. It’s a reminder that in e-commerce, language isn’t decoration. It’s a gateway, one that still goes underused in India’s crowded D2C landsca

The most successful D2C brands rarely win on product alone. They win by understanding their customers better and speaking to them in a way that feels personal, familiar, and culturally in sync. But if you look at how most D2C companies approach language, you’ll notice a blind spot: the assumption that English is “good enough.” Not when your next 5 million customers may prefer to browse, buy, and engage in their own language. This is where AI-driven localization has moved from

For years, government departments have known they need to communicate better with citizens. What’s changed now is the scale of the challenge. More people are online, more services have gone digital, and expectations have quietly shifted from basic access to genuine inclusion . A form that is only partially translated or an app that only works in English no longer feels neutral; it feels like it leaves people out. Multilingual AI, especially in areas such as app translation ,

There’s a quiet shift happening inside boardrooms of e-commerce and BFSI companies. The conversation around language technology has moved from “Should we adopt it?”  to a far more grounded question: “What returns are we really seeing from this investment?” It’s a fair question. Language AI has captured a lot of attention over the last two years, but leaders today want proof, not promises. And when looked at closely, the numbers are more revealing, and in some cases, more surp

A small scene plays out every day across India. Someone opens a bank app, tries to read a line of text, pauses, and quietly hands the phone to a family member. Not because the task is hard, but because the words feel distant. In the BFSI world, this moment isn’t small at all. It’s the moment trust wavers.  We talk endlessly about digital transformation, risk frameworks, and customer journeys. But the simplest barrier, the language customers rely on to make sense of their mone

If you sit with a banking team long enough, you'll notice something interesting. They track every number, drop-offs, repeat calls, unresolved tickets, but very few dashboards capture the simple problem of “the customer didn't understand the message.” Yet this is precisely what happens with Odia-speaking users. They're fine with the product. It's the wording that feels distant. This is usually when someone in the room says, “Let's bring in AI translation.” And that's where the

For all the attention given to India’s digital leap, one stubborn reality still shapes how citizens experience public services: most official communication is not in the language people use every day. Policies may be written in English, but daily life is lived in Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, and dozens of other tongues. As services have moved online, this gap has become even more visible. Many portals work beautifully in terms of design and technology, yet a single unfamiliar

A shopper in Coimbatore is browsing a skincare website. The product ingredients appear in English, but the usage instructions instantly switch to Tamil. Another customer from Madurai receives a return-pickup update in the language she’s most comfortable with. Neither pauses. Neither wonders how the translation happened. But both feel like the brand understands them a little better. That’s the quiet power of language AI in D2C. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t look futuristic. It

For a long time, ecommerce teams treated localization as something you plugged in at the very end of the journey, almost like a courtesy gesture rather than a growth lever. But as regional shoppers became a dominant force in online buying, that assumption began to crumble. The brands that adapted early discovered something interesting: the moment customers could explore a product in a language they naturally think in, sales didn’t just improve, they multiplied. Across beauty,