The Localisation Team makes Deliveroo's three-sided marketplace available in more than eight languages across ten countries.
We ensure the product experience and content is accurately translated, locally relevant, and culturally appropriate.
Every customer, partner, and rider deserves a seamless product experience. We support Deliveroo’s globalisation strategy by helping user-facing content creators across Deliveroo. To do this, we make English content available in all relevant languages. And we play a role in each part of the product life cycle. Our work spans from product planning and research, to design and marketing, all the way through troubleshooting. Each content owner must ensure their content is globalised. And the Localisation Team makes it happen.
What is localisation?
Localisation is a strategy to make the verbal, visual, and service experience feel native to users. Localisation considers many cultural expectations such as:
- Language tone and style,
- Cultural references,
- Food and dietary preferences,
- Local legal requirements, and
- Much, much more.
Translation, transliteration, and transcreation
It's easy to confuse translation and transliteration with localisation. However, these are unique concepts that give different levels of quality of quality. Translation is changing words and grammar from one language directly into the words and grammar of another. It is a direct approach. Transliteration is indirect. It captures not only the direct meaning of the words from one language to another, but also its essence. This is especially important in creative copy that uses linguistic tools such as collqualisims, alliteration, and cultural references to engage the reader. Transcreation is the most high-quality. It's when product teams work together with local specialists to make market-specific ads, content, and features.
We also work to meet both linguistic requirements and market requirements. Linguistic requirements (e.g. punctuation) are specific to a language—no matter where in the world it’s spoken. Market requirements (e.g. address format) are determined by the country or location and aren't language dependent.
Check out some more... Language vs. market requirement examples
When done well, localisation is invisible. We’ve succeeded when people believe the product is from their country and made just for them.
Team scope
To do quality work at a healthy pace, we are open with our team responsibilities and expectations.
We are expected to…
- Provide translations for product, marketing, and care content, and
- Own the non-English content experience across Deliveroo products.
We are not expected to...
- Update code or do any work in or with GitHub
- Be proactive and seek out localisation needs
- Redo localised content with personal or team preferences
Language and market support
We localise content into global variants in all supported languages. This means that we stick to a generic version of a language instead of a local variant. For example, the global variant of French is just simply universal French—not “France-French” (FR-FR) and “French-Belgium” (FR-BE).
For Deliveroo's Marketing and Care teams, we sometimes support local variants. This is to create an emotional connection with the customer. Check out the language overview for each of our three marketplace pillars below.
Consumer
Consumer products are all customer-facing. In other words, they’re for people who order food on the Deliveroo platform.
| Language | App | Website | Marketing | Care |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English 🇬🇧 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| French 🇫🇷 | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| French 🇫🇷 (France) | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| French 🇧🇪 (Belgium) | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Italian 🇮🇹 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Dutch 🇳🇱 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Arabic 🇦🇪 | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Arabic 🇦🇪 (UAE) | ✅ | |||
| Arabic 🇰🇼 (Kuwait) | ✅ | |||
| Chinese 🇨🇳 (Traditional) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Spanish* 🇪🇸 | ✅ | |||
| German* 🇩🇪 | ✅ |
*Legacy languages, which are not longer in scope as of January 2023.
Partner
Partner products are for restaurant and grocery partners. These folks upload inventory and sell through Deliveroo’s platform.
| Language | Hub | ROM | Order picker | Website | Help centre | Comms | Care |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English 🇬🇧 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| French 🇫🇷 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||||
| French 🇫🇷 (France) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||||
| French 🇧🇪 (Belgium) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||||
| Italian 🇮🇹 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Dutch 🇳🇱 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||||
| Dutch 🇧🇪 (Belgium) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||||
| Arabic 🇦🇪 | ✅ | ||||||
| Chinese 🇨🇳 (Traditional) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Chinese 🇨🇳 (Simplified) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Spanish* 🇪🇸 | ✅ | ✅ |
*Legacy languages, which are not longer in scope as of January 2023. *Universal (aka non-regional) variant
Rider
Riders are delivery people who bring food and groceries from our partners to our customers.
| Language | App | Website | Onboarding | Marketing & comms | Care |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English 🇬🇧 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| French 🇫🇷 | ✅ | ✅ | |||
| French 🇫🇷 (France) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| French 🇧🇪 (Belgium) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Italian 🇮🇹 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Dutch 🇳🇱 | ✅ | ✅ | |||
| Dutch 🇧🇪 (Belgium) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Chinese 🇨🇳 (Traditional) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Portuguese* 🇧🇷 (Brazilian ) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Urdu** 🇵🇰 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
*Brazilian Portuguese is covered in Rider Comms and some parts of Rider Onboarding in the UK and Ireland.
**Urdu is covered in the Rider Website for the UAE and some comms for the UAE and Qatar.
Language selection
Location doesn’t always determine the language in which someone sees our product. Below is how localisation determines language support for each of our different digital products.
Mobile apps
On mobile apps, the language is set by a user’s device.
In device settings, users can choose their preferred language. If the Deliveroo app also supports that language, it is populated by default within the app. If the Deliveroo app doesn’t support their device language, it populates with our fallback language, which is English. Users can override the default and/of fallback language. To do this, they go into their device settings to select a different language. There’s no language toggle built into the Deliveroo apps.
Web apps
On desktop apps, such as the Consumer Web app and Hub, the language is based on the user’s browser settings.
For example, a partner may be based in France. But their browser language could be Traditional Chinese. If so, the default language of the web app is Traditional Chinese.
If you want to view a web app in a different language, simply download the Locale Switcher plugin for Chrome. It easily lets you view a web app in a different language.
Web pages
On the web, such as deliveroo.co.uk or marketing landing pages, the language is set by the user’s location.
If the location isn't served by Deliveroo, then the page defaults to the fallback language of English. This can be changed with the language/location dropdown in the top-left corner.
Language usage data
This is an overview of the most used languages broken down per user group.