Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
Lunar New Year has arrived and, with it, the Chinese New Year (and related Asian New Year celebrations). As I’ve done a few times in the past, I thought I’d feature a few localized web pages from multinationals as they …
A timely article in The Wall Street Journal (that I only recently got around to reading): “The future’s not here.” American business people once saw China as dynamic, exciting and wide open. Not anymore. To which I ask: When was China ever “wide open?” An excerpt: …
I’m pleased to say that, based on the websites I study regularly, we’ve reached “peak flag.” In other words, at a high level, companies are now beginning to move away from using flags on their websites within their global gateways. …
If you are flying the Taiwan flag on your website, consider yourself warned. By China. As I’ve written many times over the past year, China is paying close attention to how multinationals refer to Taiwan on their websites, not just …
As readers of this blog well know, I often refer to China and Taiwan when making the case for avoiding the use of flags on a global gateway. There are many others reasons, of course, but geopolitical issues have become …
If you don’t know what your mobile app weighs (in kilobytes), then it’s safe to say your emerging market strategy could use some tweaking. That’s not to be harsh, but to face the simple fact that mobile users in emerging …
I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated my map of the world’s internationalized domain names for 2018: The map includes all ICANN-approved country code IDNs for the world — more than 50 across more than 30 countries and regions. I’ve …
I recently read The Chinese Typewriter by Thomas S. Mullaney. I love typewriters and languages, so this book was a sure thing as my interests go. And I learned a great deal. Perhaps the greatest takeaway was the degree to which …
I received my copies of the Japanese edition of Think Outside the Country and am very impressed. The book, like the English edition, is in full color and uses high quality paper. The book is published by Born Digital (in collaboration with Mitsue-Links) You can …
You hire a vendor to conduct a global survey. And let’s suppose this vendor refers to Taiwan as a country and the email goes out to people in China who believe differently, and they happen to be in a position …
I’m excited to announce the publication of The 2018 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the most ambitious report I’ve written so far and it sheds light on a number of new and established best practices in website globalization. First, here are …
The Marriott website was taken down in China and Taiwan on or around January 11th. You can read why here. And here we are two weeks later and the websites are still blank — or nearly so. Here’s what I’m …
The short answer: It depends. The context of how you display this flag can make all the difference; for example, do you display the flag on a global gateway with text that reads Select Country or Select Country/Region? This may seem …
If you visit Marriott’s China website today you’re likely to see this: I dumped the text into Google Translate and here is what it loosely says: So what exactly happened here? According to Skift, Marriott sent a survey in Mandarin …
In 2016, more than 120 million Chinese traveled internationally. which is roughly the entire population of Japan (or Canada, Italy and Australia combined). And only 10% of the country has a passport. Imagine the travel industry when 25% of Chinese …