Billions of people in the world do not have access to a fair and open currency or supporting financial services. At ECC, we build and support technology to change that.
Earlier this year, ECC open-sourced shielded-first wallet libraries. Almost immediately, developer teams, such as Nighthawk, used these resources to build and launch their own shielded-first apps into the world.
This quarter, ECC had a goal of making sure that 40% of the global population could read and understand the ECC wallet applications. This meant translating and localizing Android and iOS apps from English into three additional languages: simplified Chinese, Russian and Spanish.
With help from community volunteers, ECC exceeded this goal and added localization in five languages to its open-sourced apps. In addition to the three languages listed above, we were able to localize into Italian and Korean, as well, thanks to the multilingual talents of our team members Francisco Gindre and Linda Liu.
Joseph Van Geffen, Design Lead at ECC, led these localization efforts.
“What was really interesting to me is how common words in the Zcash ecosystem translate (or don’t!) to other local languages,” he said. “‘Shielded,’ for instance, doesn’t always have a direct translation. Another example is with terms like “privacy” and “security.” These are distinct concepts in English but overlap in other languages.”
“Shielded” is the term we use for private addresses in Zcash (z-addrs) or transactions between two z-addrs (z2z). In Spanish, we chose “blindado,” which is a direct translation. It just so happens that in Argentina, “blindado” also refers to an armored bank truck, which nicely reinforces the fact that these wallet libraries help people securely and safely move money. In Korean, “shielded” was represented phonetically instead of translating the term directly. “Shielded” doesn’t exist in Russian, so we went with the term “protected” instead, based on our translator’s suggestion. Our next step is to ensure the localized UI is correct and nothing was lost in translation.
ECC is committed to ensuring that Zcash is a global project, accessible to anyone regardless of location or demographic. We wanted to localize the ECC wallet in multiple languages so developer teams around the world have turn-key and accessible resources. If you want to see shielded Zcash on your favorite apps and services, send a feature request to their support teams and tell them about the libraries we created. We’d love to hear from wallet teams and developers to learn more about additional features to add to our wallet SDKs.
Our objective is wide-spread shielded-Zcash support. We have created a set of tools to make this an attainable goal, and we are actively looking for companies to partner with us to deliver this functionality to everyone.
Please note, ECC open sources shielded wallet resources to encourage developer teams to build and launch their own shielded-first apps into the world. ECC does not currently plan to deploy its own wallet to an app store.
