All Alipay screens are in Chinese – with no translation to other languages available. To make matters worse, many Alipay screens are quite complicated – with many boxes to fill-in, and buttons to press.
This complexity is because:-
- Alipay seem to take security more seriously than many other payment gateways, and;
- Alipay support a large number of Mainland China payment methods and cards.
But the result is, if you can’t read Chinese, you’ll have enormous difficulty navigating these screens.
Fortunately, the solution is easy. Either add language translation features to your existing browser. And/or install another browser with better translation support.
The main choices are:-
Google Chrome
As of September 2013 (when this was written), Google Chrome is far by far the best browser for language translation purposes. It needs to be upgraded with the “Google Translate” extension (and perhaps a few others). But this is quickly done – and these extensions are free. Click Upgrading Google Chrome with the “Google Translate” Extension for more details.
Google Chrome is a free download for Linux, Mac and Windows. So if you don’t already have a copy, we strongly recommend that you download and install one.
Firefox and Other Browsers
Firefox and some other browsers can also be upgraded with language translation plugins and the like.
So if Google Chrome isn’t available for some reason, you may be able to make do with Firefox or some other browser.
For Firefox:-
- Open the Firefox browser,
- Click “Tools” » “Add-ons”, and then;
- Search for “translation”.
You’ll get a list of the Firefox “translation” add-ons that are available. We’ll leave you to select those most suitable for your needs…
The Google Translation Service
As very much a last resort, you could also use the Google Translation Service. This is available from the Google search page. Press “More” » “Translate“, and then copy/paste some text from Alipay into the box at left. The translated text will be shown in the box right.
Unfortunately, using Google Translation Service is very tedious, if done a word or phrase at a time. And if you do the whole page at once, the text just get jumbled into one big long sentence. So finding the word or phrase belonging to a single input field or button becomes very difficult.
For these reasons, you’ll probably want to use the Google Translation Service only if none of the better options above are available.
