Slack expands into Japanese, its fifth language

Slack has announced that its popular team collaboration software is now localized for the Japanese market.

The news comes just a few months after the San Francisco-based company expanded beyond English into Spanish, French, and German and revealed that Japanese would be next up.

Users can manually change their interface language to Japanese in the Preferences menu, and admins can set the default language for the whole organization from their dashboard.

Above: Slack in Japanese

Image Credit: Slack

Founded in 2009, Slack has raised north of $700 million in funding, including a $250 million round led by Japan’s SoftBank back in September. While Slack has been the poster child for enterprise-focused team collaboration tools, it is facing increasing competition from the likes of Microsoft, which launched Teams last year as part of Office 365, leading Slack to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times. Elsewhere, Facebook is pushing its own Workplace service, Google is investing in Hangouts Chat, and Atlassian has HipChat and Stride.

Slack is facing stiff competition, for sure, but with big-name local backers such as SoftBank on board, the company stands a good chance of infiltrating the potentially lucrative Japanese market. Indeed, the company said that a number of Japanese companies have already been using Slack in English, including Tokyo stock market index Nikkei and food tech company Cookpad.