Cuban Cigar Website (CCW) is Going to China

[JohnS]

If you've logged onto Cuban Cigar Website on Monday July 12th you would have noticed an option to log on in English that you've never seen before. That's because the site has now catered to Chinese cigar enthusiasts by offering a Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese language option. Jorge Tapies, from Cigar Journal, adds further...

Following up on our April 2021 article “The gift that keeps on giving” where we interviewed Alex Groom, the Australian curator of the most comprehensive Cuban cigar database in the world, we are now pleased to announce to our friends and readers that starting on Monday July 12^th 2021, Cuban Cigar Website (CCW) will be available in Chinese. In order to satisfy the ever-increasing appetite for Cuban cigars in China, the entire database has been translated into both simplified and traditional Chinese.  All translations were done voluntarily by Patrick Chan, a Hong Kong based CCW user and friend of Alex.

Original English site: www.cubancigarwebsite.com

Simplified Chinese: 世上最优古巴雪茄资料网站 | 本网站 (cubancigarwebsite.com)

Traditional Chinese: 世上最優古巴雪茄資料網站 | 本網站 (cubancigarwebsite.com) 

As we all know, China overtook Spain to become the largest single market for Cuban cigars in 2020, and as far as we know, there isn’t any other website in Chinese that catalogues Cuban cigars in the way Alex Groom has done it.  We have no doubt that this launch will surely add to the great boom in the Chinese cigar community.  A word of caution to Alex: We hope you have the capacity to deal with a new few million users!!  

So, well done Alex and Patrick for this effort!

Source: https://www.cigarjournal.com/cuban-cigar-website-ccw-is-going-to-china/

[smbauerllc]

Interesting.
Hadn't been there that recently so hadn't seen the change.
Certainly hope it doesn't effect the outstanding information available there

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[Bijan]

Seems to have fixed the issue where the Chrome browser thought CCW pages were in Spanish and offered to translate them to English due to the vitola names

 

[LordAnubis]

Good one... Grom

[Habana Mike]

Congrats on a huge endeavor Alex and Patrick!

Maybe the Chinese will focus on a few other marcas now, not sure that's a good or bad thing though....

[El Presidente]

Congrats Alex 

[ATGroom]

11 hours ago, smbauerllc said:

Certainly hope it doesn't effect the outstanding information available there

Yep, it's just a translation. Information is identical between the versions. It is not possible to add something to the Chinese sites without also adding it to the English site.

 

10 hours ago, Bijan said:

Seems to have fixed the issue where the Chrome browser thought CCW pages were in Spanish and offered to translate them to English due to the vitola names

Haha, hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense. There is a thing in the metadata of the page where you declare "the language of this page is English, the Chinese version is located here" which is so Google knows to treat them as the same page in different languages, and not two separate unrelated pages. As there was only English previously, I wasn't doing this declaration, so I guess Chrome was making a best guess at Spanish.

 

Thanks all for your kind words, and thanks Pat for doing the work. This wasn't something I would have pursued on my own, but Pat offered to do it and I was happy to accommodate him. Not sure how many hours it took him, but it was a little over year ago that we took the first steps.

There are two components to something like this: technically I had to modify the site to be capable of serving out different languages, and then the actual translations needed to be done. The upshot is that that technical stuff is in place and could be used for any language, so if anyone speaks Spanish, German, French, or anything else, and wants a volunteer translator job, please reach out.

Looking at the stats, traffic yesterday was about double a normal day with 3x the typical number of Chinese language users. This would be entirely from the CJ post as it wouldn't have filtered out to Google, Baidu etc yet, so will be interesting to see what it looks like in a few months.

[Jimmy_jack]

These the same people buying everything on the island? Or actual cigar smokers?

[Bijan]

16 hours ago, Jimmy_jack said:

These the same people buying everything on the island? Or actual cigar smokers?

From what I've heard the Chinese smokers buy to smoke even vintage cigars.

[Duxnutz]

Yeah nah. Much like all the wine huh.