According to The Wall Street Journal: When Swedish air-traffic controllers speak to Italian pilots they speak English. When Dutch importers do business with Chinese manufacturers, they use English. Ditto for Russians trading with Indians and Taiwanese selling in Bangladesh. Now…
According to the US Census Bureau, the US will finish 2004 with a population of 295 million, up roughly 3 million over the year before. Thanks to international migration, the US population will continue to grow at the rate of…
Localization industry organization LISA has posted an interesting Q&A with Ori Redler, co-founder of software vendor RedleX, which has developed a word processing application for the Mac that supports such “minority” languages as Welsh, Farsi and Hebrew. Not only does…
Amazon recently added China to its global gateway. The link to takes you to Joyo.com, a company Amazon acquired over the summer. It will be interesting to see if Amazon attempts to “re-brand” Joyo as Amazon, or leave it as…
McDonald’s China Web site was hacked, apparently by a person (or people) protesting the company’s reference to Taiwan as a separate country. The Taiwan/China issue is bound to produce headaches for multinationals who want to offer local Web sites for…
Afrikaans > Een plesierige kersfees Arabic > I’D MIILAD SAID OUA SANA SAIDA Armenian > Shenoraavor Nor Dari yev Pari Gaghand Azeri > Tezze Iliniz Yahsi Olsun Basque > Zorionak eta Urte Berri On! Bohemian> Vesele Vanoce Brazilian > Boas…
A very exciting (and very technical) position is opening up with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at Keio University in Japan. Your mission is to “advance Web internationalization, so that current Web technology stays, and new Web technology becomes,…
It certainly thinks so. Here is a screen grab from their global gateway page: I think they’ve got a long ways to go yet.
The Wall Street Journal documents Microsoft’s efforts to profit from developing markets while battling piracy. As I’ve mentioned before, Microsoft’s response over the past decade to a piracy-prone market has been to simply ignore that market. That is, until Linux…
Globalization services vendor Lionbridge is on a hiring spree. It posted more than 20 job positions in December, gearing up for a big 2005.
As the end of 2004 draws near, I feel compelled to toss in a few predictions for the year ahead… Web Globalization Goes Mainstream Based on surveys Ive conducted, discussions with executives at Fortune 500 companies, and a few recent…
Globalization services and software vendor SDL announced today that it won a 3-year language services contract from Microsoft. Although Microsoft outsources work to nearly every major localization firm, this is still a very nice win for SDL.
Bowne Global Solutions, one of the “big 3” in the content globalization industry, uses Salesforce.com to manage its global sales team. I have found over the past two years that more and more globalization companies have begun using Salesforce.com, and…
Winston Chai at CNET explains the current state of internationalized domain names (IDNs) and why China may play a forceful role in pushing companies like Microsoft to begin supporting them. Briefly, the domain name system (DNS) currently only supports a…
Corante’s New York Blog reports that MTV is launching three Asian pop music channels targeting Indian, Korean and Chinese viewers in the United States.