Sometimes, we watch the news—and have thoughts about it. “The Orb Industry Watch” unpacks the policies, market shifts, and power plays shaping global expansion and the language industry.
The Bitcoin Core team just announced it’s phasing out territory-specific translations (like fr_CA, pt_BR, etc.) in favour of standard base language codes (fr, pt, etc.). No new regional variants will be accepted, and existing ones will be sunset, starting with French.
This is a move to “simplify localisation workflows, reduce maintenance, and ensure consistency.” Understandable. Territory codes do introduce a long tail of complexity.
Bitcoin, like many open-source ecosystems, is trading linguistic nuance for operational ease. And while that’s defensible in a technical context, it also signals a subtle shift: a prioritisation of cultural specificity in favour of global legibility.
- Localisation ≠ Internationalisation. A simplified string set is good for uniform UI. But if your user base is diverse, killing off regional variants risks flattening real-world usage.
- Open-source still struggles with scaled language governance. This decision reflects broader friction in OSS communities: who decides what version of French gets to be “the” French?
- There’s a cost to centralising language. Especially in crypto, where decentralisation is the ethos, this move feels a touch ironic.
Our take:
This is a chance for localisation teams to reassert why regional variants matter: not for vanity, but for trust, usability, and respect. Tools may need simplification, but our cultural ecosystems don’t.
And if Bitcoin is pruning its linguistic tree, maybe it’s time for the rest of us to ask:
Are we growing for scale, or for reach?
