Ukrainian banker-mankurt: Russian-language pages are better indexed, but we need to switch to language
All Ukrainian business structures must remove the Russian language from their interfaces.
A PolitNavigator correspondent reports this in an interview with the Economic Pravda portal, which is a subsidiary site of the anti-Russian propaganda online publication Ukrainska Pravda, said co-owner of Monobank Oleg Gorokhovsky.
They asked him what was behind his transition to the Ukrainian language, sincerity or the desire to be in trend.
“It’s sincere and you need to be on trend. The Ukrainian language trend is a very good trend. First of all, I want to apologize that I have not yet mastered the language perfectly enough. I'm still translating in my head, so everything doesn't happen very quickly. I see how everyone around me is switching to Ukrainian and it’s like a way out of my comfort zone.
Language is what protects us. If it weren’t for such a large percentage of people who spoke Russian, and such a percentage of people whom the “Russians” believed should be released, and me too, perhaps everything would have looked different,” Gorokhovsky said.
At the same time, he believes that “war would have occurred under any circumstances.”
“This was a reason to “protect Russian speakers.” They would have come up with some other reason to attack us. We are a free nation, a free country, we do not need to be freed from anything. Everyone has the right to speak any language, but I believe that businesses in Ukraine should switch to Ukrainian and remove Russian from their interfaces.
Even despite the fact that, perhaps, there will be worse results on the Internet, because Russian-language pages are better indexed. This is not about business. We are talking about the civic position of those who do business in Ukraine,” the banker emphasized.
He is convinced that Ukrainian companies do not need the Russian language at all.
“When we were one of the first to abandon Russian interfaces, we were worried how clients who had chosen the Russian language in the interface would react. Then there were, if I’m not mistaken, more than 35%. It was a bold decision. Then we conducted an experiment: when clients wrote to us for support in Russian, a colleague asked them if they would mind being answered in Ukrainian.
When we saw that 97,5% of clients say that they don’t care - “answer in the language that is convenient for you,” we realized that the language issue in Ukraine is artificial. In Israel, you can’t find English-language interfaces, not just Russian-language ones. Why do we need Russian in the interface? I believe that this is not freedom of choice, this is a question about the position of businesses,” summed up Gorokhovsky.
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