Here's a nice tip via the ever useful Expat Grocery Gurus Korea Facebook Group. The Coupang (쿠팡) app now has a setting to change the language to English. Not only will this make the app's user interface and controls in English, but it even translates the products, descriptions, and reviews too. Neat.
Let's take a quick look.
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| Coupang app in English |
Setting the language
It's a very simple language setting to change. Open your Coupang app and click down on the little person icon to access your profile options:
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| Coupang app main page |
Scroll down to the bottom and you'll see the new language setting:
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| Coupang app settings |
Right now it seems to support only English but perhaps they'll add a few other languages later?
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| Coupang app language settings |
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| Coupang app main page in English |
Item descriptions and reviews
For a test, let's search, in English, for a product everyone absolute agrees is wonderful: Vegemite.
For a side by side, you can see that a normal (Korean) search shows the expected results, but now, with the English setting, you can see everything has been translated: the product name, shipping information, star reviews, search results filters, even the ads and the Korean money symbols. Neat.
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| Coupang listings, ENG and KOR, side by side |
And by the way, in case anyone was suspicious that searching for a product name in English versus in Korean would yield different pricing, I didn't see this behavior. At least not for Vegemite.
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| Coupang pricing seems the same regardless of langauge |
Anyway, all the supplementary info is in English, including the sizing options:
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| Supplementary info in English |
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| Coupang app auto-translated product reviews |
Returns and exchange info page is now in English:
Problems / Issues
One problem with this system though is that so many of Coupang's products have the actual product descriptions hard-encoded into images that accompany the page. Take our Vegemite for example: |
| Long images of product description |
There is a long description of what it is, how to use it, shipping source info, etc. But it's all in Korean and cannot be translated, because it's a series of images all stacked up. A lot of products seem to be like that. Just something to be aware of.
Additionally, this seems to be in-app only for now. I scoured the desktop webpage for Coupang and found no setting for translating in this way. Only in the mobile app. Of course you can just use Chrome auto-translate on PC.
Final thoughts
Interesting, at the moment I see zero mention of this in either Korean news or English news. Maybe Korea Times will put something out in a day or two. So big tip of the hat to Expat Grocery Gurus for this hopefully life-improving tip for foreign residents in Korea.
Coupang delivery has certainly made my life easier. And no more shame of the cashiers and all the people in line peering at my cart at checkout to see what this big-noser is buying.
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