Russian is spoken not only in Russia. Where is Russian localization for version 2?

[Maksimus]

Hi all!

I live in Moldova, but I speak Russian. Moldova is not under sanctions.

I have been using Affinity Suite products for a year now and I really like them.

Updated yesterday to version 2 and suddenly found that now the interface does not support the Russian language.

Guys, I understand that sanctions have been imposed on Russia and there is no way for people to pay with Russian cards.

I understand that you are not particularly interested in that market now.

But there are 3 arguments:

1. A huge number of creative people who worked in Russia and speak Russian have left the country and are working remotely somewhere abroad. They continue to be your audience and customers.
    
2. Very many of the russians have already made payment cards abroad and transferred their capital outside of Russia. Therefore, they continue to be paying customers for Serif and make a profit.
    
3. In addition to Russia and the 146 million people living there, more than 300 million people speak Russian all over the world. That is, another 150+ million live outside of Russia and speak Russian. They are also your customers.

Given all of the above, I do not understand why you removed the Russian language from your applications. Not everyone who speaks Russian is inside Russia and supports the war and the course of the government.

Therefore, a big request to Serif is to return the Russian localization inside the Affinity Suite applications. Thank you for understanding the aspirations of your customers.

[LisiyCin]

Hi all!
I am Russian and I do not support this war, we sold everything and the whole family went to live in Montenegro, since May we have been living and working here and are not going to return, the youngest son goes to a local school, the eldest works, we all have a residence permit!

I was very pleased with release 2.0, I used to buy only Photo, but today I read that they added a new one and bought it, I bought it not for rubles, but for euros, from a local bank card, but when I saw that there was no Russian interface, I was annoyed, looked at the forum, saw that it was not one such and decided to write!

I perfectly understand and support the policy of Affinity about not selling their products in the aggressor country, but people who not only left, but also those who stayed and do not support the regime need to work, receive money for their continued existence.

I ask you, please, return the Russian interface, or for example, add Serbian, we want it, because we want to get citizenship here in the future!

[jmwellborn]

@LisiyCin and @Maksimus  I hope you will be able to get this resolved.  And thank you for standing with the free world against appalling tyranny!

[Maksimus]

14 hours ago, LisiyCin said:

I ask you, please, return the Russian interface, or for example, add Serbian, we want it, because we want to get citizenship here in the future!

Serbian is spoken by too few people in the world. Therefore, it is not necessary to make an interface on it. But 300+ million think and speak Russian. And a good half of them do not live in Russia. By the way, 40% of Ukrainians speak Russian, including the President of Ukraine (Russian is his native language).

The US speaks English and Spanish. And this has long had nothing to do with England and Spain. Therefore, depriving the Affinity interface of the Russian language is a bad and impractical idea. IMHO.

[ashf]

Probably Serif just didn't have the time to implement Russian translation.
It may come to v2 at some point...
 

[Maksimus]

7 minutes ago, ashf said:

Probably Serif just didn't have the time to implement Russian translation.
It may come to v2 at some point...
 

The interface of the first and second versions of Affinity Suite has not experienced too significant changes. Rather, they are cosmetic and local. They already had Russian localization of the interface in the first version.

Therefore, transferring it to the second was not particularly difficult. There's something different here. Possibly politics. Let's hope that reason and commercial expediency will overcome these prejudices.

[Maksimus]

I think the Serif team needs to take a cue from their American counterparts at BlackMagic Design.

Although they removed the Russian language from their site, they (of course) left the Russian language in the Davinci Resolve interface.

Why? Because Americans are extremely pragmatic people who know how to do business.

They understand that they have a lot of users who think and speak Russian. These are their customers, which means their sales and subsequent profits. And losing customers and profits due to some kind of sanctions is not good for business.

Let's hope that the Serif team has the same pragmatism, respect for the Russian-speaking part of the customer audience, the desire to earn more will overcome some temporary oddities about the exclusion of the Russian language from the Affinity Suite interface languages.

[EmT]

Hi @Maksimus

This topic has been discussed previously, the post below may provide more information. 

 

[chakko007]

Sorry, I could maybe halfway understand that decision if you were dealing with Russian companies, but, withdrawing sales to Russian citizens? WTH do they have to do with political discussions by their government?

That's like claiming that every German was a nazi in the Third Reich. No sir. My grandparents weren't nazis.

I sincerely hope that you reconsider your decisions, because they only will hurt people who don't have to do with the war, and who are in need of cost efficient alternatives to expensive software,. You also will do nothing about Russia's political decisions with the decision to not sell to Russian citizens. That's an error in your thinking.

Anyway, as has been pointed, this way, you will also not cater to other Russian speaking nations.

[deeds]

Everyone's a loser in this situation. 

[tudor]

On 11/11/2022 at 10:02 AM, Maksimus said:

But 300+ million think and speak Russian.

It's not about how many people in the world speak Russian. It's about the number of purchases made by Russian-speaking people who need Russian localization. Not enough demand – no localization. It's as simple as that. It doesn't have anything to do with politics.

[deeds]

5 minutes ago, tudor said:

It's not about how many people in the world speak Russian. It's about the number of purchases made by Russian-speaking people who need Russian localization. Not enough demand – no localization. It's as simple as that. It doesn't have anything to do with politics.

Sounds like made up "facts" to fit a narrative deflection you'd like to paint. You got any evidence for this, other than Russian not being within the current localised languages?

 

Is Greek?

[chakko007]

9 minutes ago, tudor said:

It's not about how many people in the world speak Russian. It's about the number of purchases made by Russian-speaking people who need Russian localization. Not enough demand – no localization. It's as simple as that. It doesn't have anything to do with politics.

Sounds pretty political to me.

[tudor]

1 minute ago, chakko007 said:

Sounds pretty political to me.

The decision to stop selling in Russia is political. But we've been told in this topic that there are another 300+ million Russian-speaking people in the world. They are free to purchase the software.

[PaulEC]

14 minutes ago, tudor said:

It's not about how many people in the world speak Russian. It's about the number of purchases made by Russian-speaking people who need Russian localization. Not enough demand – no localization. It's as simple as that. It doesn't have anything to do with politics.

Exactly, it's the same with RTL languages and other localised specifics; commercially it makes no difference how many people speak or write a language, what is important is how many people will buy a particular piece of software because it uses that language! People accuse Serif of being "anti" this or that, or of being "disrespectful" to them, but I'm sure it's simply a case of, with limited time and resources: do you work on features that will benefit the vast majority of people using the apps, or on things that will only benefit a comparatively small group of them!

I'm not saying that Serif shouldn't do these things, just that it is a matter of priorities. 

[Maksimus]

6 minutes ago, chakko007 said:

Sorry, I could maybe halfway understand that decision if you were dealing with Russian companies, but, withdrawing sales to Russian citizens? WTH do they have to do with political discussions by their government?

That's like claiming that every German was a nazi in the Third Reich. No sir. My grandparents weren't nazis.

I sincerely hope that you reconsider your decisions, because they only will hurt people who don't have to do with the war, and who are in need of cost efficient alternatives to expensive software,. You also will do nothing about Russia's political decisions with the decision to not sell to Russian citizens. That's an error in your thinking.

Anyway, as has been pointed, this way, you will also not cater to other Russian speaking nations.

As a last resort, if Affinity continues the cultures of canceling Russian, then someone in the community will find out where they store the language localization files and how it is installed in the Affinity software.

Then someone can make a Russian localization, and then distribute it with installation instructions. That's right, I have been connecting a file with grammatical errors in Russian in Affinity Suite products for a long time.

Therefore, for now, we hope for the reasonableness and tolerance of the Affinity team and their desire to make their product convenient for customers from different countries. And if they don’t get it right and the culture of canceling Russian continues, then the Russian community of Affinity users will make Russian localization on their own.

[tudor]

11 minutes ago, deeds said:

Sounds like made up "facts" to fit a narrative deflection you'd like to paint. You got any evidence for this, other than Russian not being within the current localised languages?

It's common sense: if a company has many Russian-speaking paying customers all over the world, it will serve that market as well as possible. It is in their best interest, otherwise they will lose sales.

[deeds]

2 minutes ago, tudor said:

It's common sense: if a company has a lot of paying Russian-speaking customers all over the world, it will serve that market as well as possible.

 

There's an entire campaign for blue and yellow that celebrates sanctioning Russians, that could be the reason for this being misplaced attempts at virtue signalling, which would also qualify as a "common sense" explanation, with just as little evidence as your claim. 

[Maksimus]

20 minutes ago, chakko007 said:

Sounds pretty political to me.

The first version of Affinity Suite had Russian localization. So there were a lot of sales and customers who spoke Russian.

They stayed, they are signed and aware of the release of the second version of Affinity Suite. So they will find a way to pay for it if necessary. So what you said has nothing to do with reality.

Now Russians go on special tours to neighboring countries to order a plastic card for payment abroad. They also use various one-time payment card services for payment. Therefore, Russians will remain a solvent audience for Serif. And if earlier there were so many of them that Serif made a Russian localization, then it is unlikely that there will be fewer of them, given that there are no special alternatives to Adobe on the market now.

An example should be taken from Adobe. They were not at all embarrassed by the sanctions against Russia. All their products continue to support the Russian language. And OMG! Their site continues to support the Russian language! Why? Because in Adobe they know very well that there are plenty of Russians all over the world and they should not be written off as paying customers. 😀

[fde101]

On 11/14/2022 at 3:47 AM, Maksimus said:

American counterparts at BlackMagic Design.

How would they do that when Blackmagic Design is an Australian company?

[PaoloT]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

How would they do that when Blackmagic Design is an Australian company?

That's the problem of identification of languages and nationality. Everybody who speaks Russian must be Russian, anywhere in the world they live. In the same way, anybody who speaks English must be American.

(In my country there are still people who pretend that the German-speaking minority should stop speaking it, and use the majority language – Italian – in their everyday life. One of my German-speaking friends even wrote an opera on this).

Paolo

 

[fde101]

5 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

In my country there are still people who pretend that the German-speaking minority should stop speaking it, and use the majority language – Italian – in their everyday life.

Not sure about that particular situation, but the "majority" language is not entirely relevant.  In the USA, the only language considered appropriate for legal documents is English.  If you live in the USA, you should learn enough English to be able to complete legal documents and understand law enforcement and emergency services personnel, etc.  If your primary language is something else, great, keep speaking it - but learn English too.

If you live in a country where the legally recognized language is Spanish, Japanese or Russian - the same concept should apply.

 

8 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

In the same way, anybody who speaks English must be American.

This is a particularly interesting perspective when written on a forum of a company based in England, where the language originated...

[PaoloT]

15 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Not sure about that particular situation, but the "majority" language is not entirely relevant.  In the USA, the only language considered appropriate for legal documents is English.

Italy has no official language established by the Constitution. Only in 1999 an ordinary law established Italian as the official language. Coming out of the fascist dictatorship, that forbid any other language apart for Italian, the founders of the Republic decided to avoid this norm.

The Constitution states that linguistic minorities have to be protected. It doesn't say which ones, but the two main ones are German and French. In practice, German and French became really protected and adopted in official documents only in the late Sixties, after a long series of guerrilla-like acts in the territories.

One needs to use Italian in Italy, but French or German, used as a peer language, are mandatory to work in a public office in the relevant territories.

15 minutes ago, fde101 said:

This is a particularly interesting perspective when written on a forum of a company based in England, where the language originated...

Like The Beatles, English is the best American thing!

Paolo

 

[Patrick Connor]

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