The Lissi Wallet is now available in 12 languages!

About the Lissi wallet

The Lissi wallet is a simple but powerful tool to manage digital interactions. It can be used to establish connections to third parties and to exchange information. You can find a more detailed explanation here or on our website. It’s currently available as an open beta version for iOS and Android.

The importance of multi language support

Within the identity community, we spend considerable time to ensure interoperability between different solutions. We engage in conversations in a variety of standardization bodies to enable a seamless user experience on a global scale. Frankly speaking, we are not there just yet. But we are on a good way to enable access to the services regardless of where an entity is based or which social background an individual has. While regulation as well as technical and educational hurdles remain, it’s crucial to increase the accessibility of products to different cultures and languages.

We have already received feedback from multiple stakeholders from the public and private sector saying that multi-language support is essential for the execution of various use cases. There are several nations, which have multiple official languages. If our end-user facing products are not available in the most common languages, it creates entry barriers so big that not even a piloting of these use cases would make sense. Hence, we took note and worked hard to ensure the Lissi wallet is available in the languages of communities, which currently explore the self-sovereign identity concept.

The Lissi wallet now supports the following languages:

• Arabic
• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Romanian
• Spanish, and
• Turkish.

Challenges remain

When designing a wallet, the language is only a small part of the whole user experience. The task is to design a universal cockpit, which people can navigate regardless of their social background. Similar to a dashboard in a car, which doesn’t look too different wherever you go. In order to achieve this, we have to standardize the icons, colours and user-flows to a certain degree. However, on the other hand, they need to be adjusted to the target audience. Let’s take the colour red as an example. In western cultures, red is associated with excitement, danger, urgency and love, whereas the same colour evokes danger and caution in the middle-east. In India, it’s associated with purity, while in China it symbolizes luck and happiness. Finding the right balance between standardization and necessary adjustments for the target audience will require knowledge about the cultural differences, feedback and time. When it comes to language it creates its own set of difficulties. Differences can be observed in the usage of genders, the left-to-right or right-to-left reading, the information density or the usage of tenses, just to name a few. Furthermore, there isn’t a common terminology used within the community, which makes a translation into different languages even more challenging.

Hence, our translation won’t be perfect. While we worked with native speakers, the context is often difficult to explain without demonstrating the user-flow and an actual use-case. Languages also change depending on the use-case or the subject in question. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to making the Lissi wallet even more accessible by adding additional languages and improving our current translation with your feedback. What language would you like to have us support next? We are always looking for translators for additional languages, so reach out to us to get our winter 2021 edition of Lissi Merchandise!

Cheers. The Lissi team.