How do you handle Estonian-language storefront + Russian layer for Ida-Viru?

Estonian (eesti keel) is a Finno-Ugric language, not a Baltic language like Latvian or Lithuanian. It’s closest to Finnish, and uses these non-ASCII characters: õ ä ö ü š ž. Encoding mistakes (Latin-1 instead of UTF-8) are still common and break customer-service email subjects + invoice PDFs, we always verify UTF-8 end to end.

For storefronts serving the whole country, you also need a Russian-language layer:

• ~25% of Estonia’s population is ethnic Russian, concentrated in Ida-Viru county (Narva is ~95% Russian-speaking) and parts of Tallinn (Lasnamäe, Põhja-Tallinn).
• Most are bilingual but prefer Russian for shopping, conversion lift from adding a Russian storefront is typically 15-30% for stores selling into Ida-Viru.

Magento setup:

1. Two store views in the same Magento store: et (Estonian, default) and ru (Russian).
2. Translate product names + descriptions + category trees + CMS pages + email templates per store view.
3. Estonian admin via the i18n pack (Mageplaza / Magenest / community pack, we usually QA + patch missing strings).
4. Customer-service strings (order-confirm emails, shipping notifications) translated by a native EE speaker, not Google Translate.
5. Currency stays EUR for both store views (Estonia is fully on EUR, no kroon since 2011).