The Armenian market: three languages and strict rules for advertising

A small market with a high share of IT audience and its own alphabet, which breaks layouts more often than Cyrillic does. Armenian is mandatory for consumer information, Russian and English are expected. Payments run through local systems, and gambling advertising is restricted so heavily that it must be checked before a creative is designed, not after.

What changes when you enter Armenia

Three working interface languages: Armenian as mandatory for consumer information, Russian for a large part of the audience, English for the IT sector and relocated professionals. The Armenian alphabet has its own fonts, character widths and hyphenation rules — strings that fit into a button in Russian will not fit in Armenian. The payment market: ArCa system cards and international cards, the Idram and Telcell wallets, banking apps. Betting and gambling advertising is restricted by law, and platforms enforce it.

• Languages: Armenian, Russian, English; switching without losing context and with string length checks.
• Payments: ArCa and international cards, Idram, Telcell Wallet, banking apps; cancellation and refund for each.
• Formats: the dram as ֏ or AMD after the amount, phone +374, a single time zone.
• Fonts: Armenian character support in every product font, including emails and pushes.
• Advertising: restrictions for betting, gambling and financial products — a checklist with a lawyer before creatives are made.

Pre-launch checklist

1. LQA in Armenian on real devices: character rendering, string length in buttons and tabs, hyphenation.
2. Payment regression through ArCa, Idram and Telcell in test mode: payment, cancellation, refund, timeout.
3. Checks of dram, phone, address and date formats in all three languages.
4. Checks of creatives and promo pages against the advertising restriction checklist for the product category.
5. Support in Viber, Telegram and WhatsApp with templates in three languages.

Localization into Armenian

The main defects of Armenian localization are technical: a font without Armenian characters, clipped strings, wrong hyphenation, wrong number forms. That is why LQA matters more than translation here. We translate with a native speaker through partners under our glossary and checklist and check every string in the interface on real screens, not in a spreadsheet.

• A single glossary of product terms in three languages.
• Checks of every product font for Armenian alphabet support.
• A separate pass through emails, pushes and documents.

Support after launch

First line in Russian and English in-house, in Armenian with a native speaker through partners under the same playbook. Channels — Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp and the website chat, coverage hours on Yerevan time. For iGaming and financial products — material moderation with a decision log.