Waidongxi — English Translations of Chinese Apps
A project for ProductHunt’s 2018 Makers Festival
On November 6th, 2018, I decided to move to China.
There was so much happening in the Chinese tech ecosystem that so few people knew about around the world, that it became a fascination — an obsession of mine to learn about.
- 3 of the top 5 phone manufacturers in the world are Chinese (Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo).
- China is the only country in which there have been $1 billion Series-A rounds of investment.
- On Double11 (Chinese Black Friday), one single company, Alibaba, beat out the entirety of the US Black Friday sales in 1hr and 47 mins.
- Four of the top 5 biggest banks in the world are Chinese.
- China functionally operates as an entirely cashless society
When landed in Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of China, I wanted to integrate myself as much as possible. I wanted to avoid using VPNs and staying in a bubble of foreigners.
Chinese App User Interfaces are Hard
I quickly became aware of how difficult it was to use Chinese Apps.
First, it’s hard to know what apps people use without asking people or having someone tell you what they do.
Second, user interfaces in China are hella complex — there’s a huge contrast between the western style strive for minimalism and simplicity, and the average Chinese website, which comes across extremely cluttered and has dozens of options. The fact that it’s all in Chinese (almost never any english) adds to the difficulty.
Enter Waidongxi
Waidongxi 外东西 is a play on words derived from two expressions:
- Mai dong xi 买东西 which means to shop, or buy things
- Wai guo ren 外国人 which means foreigner
Together, they make Waidongxi 外东西 or “foreign things”.
The idea is simple. Waidongxi is a reference website to take popular Chinese apps, and create static translations of the main menu items (not the entire app) to help foreigners navigate Chinese apps.
Why — dongxi? (haha get it?)
There are a number of advantages Waidongxi can provide foreigners coming to China.
- New app discovery
- App registration walkthroughs
- App translations
- Other resources
It’s a simple idea, and the website is already live at http://waidongxi.com. Currently just getting translations done, and hoping that we’ll have more and more content, both manually uploaded, as well as crowdsourced, to put up soon.
Enjoy!
About Izzy:
Iskender (Izzy) Piyale-Sheard spent more than a year as the trip facilitator for the world’s first co-working retreat for software developers, Hacker Paradise. Since then, he’s been the Community Manager for one of Canada’s top coding bootcamps, Lighthouse Labs.
Today, he is running Unlock China, a discovery trip to help western startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprise innovation teams connect with the tech ecosystem in China.
