Nextel en Español
Nextel recently launched a Spanish-language site to better market to Hispanic customers. Here is the site: www.nextel.com This is good first step. But Nextel still has a long way to go. In all, less than 20 Web pages (by my…
Month August 2003
Can You Find the Global Gateway?
I’m a strong advocate for “global gateways.” A global gateway is the term I used to refer to the navigation system that directs users to their language-specific or locale-specific Web sites. Once you offer more than one language or locale,…
World Bank Adds Arabic Web Site (Finally)
Just in time for its meetings in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the World Bank has launched an Arabic-language Web site. You can visit the site at: www.albankaldawli.org (Note the localized URL). According to the press release, more than “100 web…
Unicode: Bigger and Better
The Unicode Consortion has released Version 4.0. For those not familiar with it, Unicode is “the fundamental specification for the representation of text, at the core of all modern software, programming languages, and standards, including Windows, Java, C#, Perl, XML,…
An Intro to Indic Scripts
Richard Ishida provides an excellent introduction to Indic scripts, specifically Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. I’ve always found these scripts to be very intimidating and Richard’s paper makes them a bit less so. To download…
Monolingual vs. Multilingual Web Pages
Here is another fine Q&A from Richard Ishida of the World Wide Web Consortium Internationalization Group: What are the trade-offs between international sites that are monolingual vs. multilingual?
Worldwide Profits
A nice article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on how Web globalization benefits small business owners.
Revenge of the Non-Native English Speakers
Here is a very timely article on the growing relevance of multilingual, multicultural employees to the success of their companies within the U.S. and abroad. According to the article: No longer is a non-native English speaker a secondary employee. Indeed,…
Globalizing CSS
As more and more Web sites make use of cascading style sheets (CSS), more and more Webmasters will struggle with localizing these sites into additional languages. Here is a valuable new Q&A from the W3C Internationalization Group. Question: What is…
Who’s Using Unicode Right Now?
It it sometimes assumed that Unicode is a popular encoding “behind the scenes” but rarely used on the home pages of major corporate Web sites. While many major corporate Web sites have yet to adopt Unicode as their default encodings,…