Swearing, nudity, and language barriers: one startup’s baptism of fire in Myanmar

The other day I was having dinner with my friend Hendrik Beck, who works at Squar (pronounced “square”). Squar, which I covered a few months ago, is one of the only significant startups working in the digital space in Myanmar. It’s building an interest-based social network. While we were eating, a crisis erupted on his phone. Skype was chirping on his Nexus, and I asked him what was up.

According to our Burmese community managers, some guy in Myanmar is verbally attacking other users (in Burmese) on the Squar platform and we’re all chatting trying to figure out what to do about the problem.

Rita Nguyen, the Vietnamese-Canadian founder and CEO at Squar, spent that night communicating with Burmese community managers, Vietnamese developers, and her German technical lead. It’s a trilingual team. Rita communicates to the team in English and they communicate to each other in their own languages.

At the end of the day, Squar had to create several protocols to shut down hostile users as well as create foul language filters that would flag cursing on the platform. Of course, all this has to come from Burmese community managers as it’s in a language that no one in the development, design, and management teams knows.

An education in Burmese culture

The interesting thing about this entire affair is that Squar’s entire platform is only in Burmese. That means the CEO, developers, and designers have no idea what the users are saying. They have to rely solely on the Burmese community managers they hired on the ground. According to Rita:

The biggest challenge at Squar is building an online community you can’t read. We had to train community managers to manage online communities in a country where internet penetration is far below 10 percent.

Thus, in the beginning stages, Rita had her community managers translate everything from users, including feature requests and feedback. Burmese staff used to just assume that Rita understood Burmese cultural nuance, but now they’re more revealing in their descriptions of what’s going on. Over the course of months, the Burmese staff began to understand what to watch out for. Thus, when Myanonymous started texting, they knew it was all bad.

Rita Nguyen, founder and CEO of Squar, is on the right in red.

Language beyond the trolls

The cutting edge of the internet in Myanmar