Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
The Jehovah’s Witnesses announced today that its website reached 1,000 languages, an impressive achievement. The release notes: On November 4, 2019, jw.org, the official website of Jehovah’s Witnesses, reached an unprecedented translation milestone—it now includes articles, videos, and audio content available …
Looks like the most recent WordPress Translation Day was a linguistic success. Here are the details from WP Tavern: Events in 35 countries (see map below) 183 new contributors 12 new global translation editors (GTEs) WordPress supports more than 200 …
Last year, I wrote an essay for Multilingual in which I noted that the world’s most multilingual website isn’t Google or Facebook or even Wikipedia. It is the website of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. As I noted in the essay: The JW.org website supports more than 675 written …
Did you know that (US) English accounts for fewer than half of all WordPress interfaces currently in use? As you can see below, courtesy of WordPress, English still technically accounts for more than half when you include Australia, Canada, etc, …
I’m pleased to have an essay in the latest Tekom World Book: Speaking in Tongues: What Languages Should Your Website Support? Link
In 2008, Google launched a project called Knol. Remember it? It was designed to replace Wikipedia. Google apparently wasn’t happy that so many of its visitors were quickly abandoning it for this nonprofit wealth of information. But Knol died a …
#serveinmylanguage It’s more than a hashtag; it’s a social movement. And it’s growing. A movement among Indian consumers to force the vendors who depend on their business to actually support their native languages. As this Times of India article notes: From ATMs …
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 …
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my newest book: Think Outside the Country: A Guide to Going Global and Succeeding in the Translation Economy. This book is the result of the past decade spent working with marketing and web …
According to People’s Daily, a number of runners in a South China marathon suffered from more than simply lack of hydration. Try lack of translation. The bar of soap shown above was included in each runner’s swag bag — apparently a number of …
A few years ago I wrote about the translation icon and its many variations at that point in time. I thought now would be a good time to revisit this icon. Let’s start with the Google Translate. This icon has not changed …
Every translation vendor offers the highest-quality translations. Or so they say. But how do you know for sure that one translation is better than another translation? And, for that matter, how do you fairly benchmark machine translation engines? TAUS has …
In 2005, I wrote transcreation is gaining momentum. I predicted that we’d see a lot more use of this word in the years ahead. Why? Because “translation sounds like a commodity; transcreation sounds like a service.” So here we are …
If you haven’t visited the Noun Project yet, take a moment and drop by. It’s a great initiative to provide open source icons. All you have to do is provide attribution according to the Creative Commons license. I noticed recently …
The Khan Academy is out to revolutionize education by providing a free online education through lots and lots of well-produced videos. A core component of this revolution is the subtitling these 2,700 videos (and counting) into many languages. To get …