Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
The WSJ writes about Intel’s new global advertising campaign, which is being locally tailored using regionally and/or locally recognized celebrities. The tagline “Experience entertainment in your lap” features the likes of Seal, Tony Hawk, and Chinese celebrity Tony Leung seated …
The Taipei Times (by way of McChronicles) reports that McDonald’s Taiwan has sold 5 million units of its home-grown rice burger after only six months on the market. Not bad. More important, McDs is looking to expand its new burger …
According to Internet Retailer “Waterford Wedgwood plc has launched its first online destination and first direct-to-consumer e-commerce site in the U.S. for its Wedgwood china products, WedgwoodUSA.com. The site was designed and developed by Fry Inc.” Interestingly, Wedgwood chose to …
Pacific Gas & Electric Company has launched a Spanish-language site for the US market. Here’s the press release The Spanish site is parked at www.pge.com/espanol. But PG&E wisely also redirects from the URL: www.pge.com/es. Also important, the English PG&E site …
Globalization services provider SDL and XML authoring software provider Astoria have partnered to help Siemens Medical Solutions save an estimated $1 million on localization costs, according to this press release. There were two interesting items in the release worth mentioning… …
The New York Times has an entertaining piece on culture and its role in how long people are apt to wait in line. The article focuses on the new Disney Hong Kong theme park, which has had experienced epic lines …
I’m not sure if this is a first for Warner Brothers but it is the first time I’ve seen it. The movie studio is running a Spanish-language ad for the new Tim Burton flic Corpse Bride in Spanish for the …
Web usability consultant Jared Spool recently wrote about the difference between designing for “consistency” and designing for “current knowledge.” This concept has great relevance to the design of global Web sites Jared writes… The problem with thinking in terms of …
Its name is Clay Tablet and it is focused purely on helping companies manage multilingual Web sites. It claims to have a patent-pending technology that makes the process of sending files to translators and getting them up onto the Web …
I just upgraded from iTunes 4 to iTunes 5 and, wouldn’t you know it, Apple changed the global navigation system. Instead of placing the link to the “global gaeway” in the upper left corner of the music store, the link …
Michael Kaplan called my attention the latest Unicode fashion accessory: For those who don’t get it, that funny little question-mark character is what Mac users see when their computers don’t have the right font to display a given character (or …
Apple has posted a list of the top 10 songs purchased from its growing list of country iTunes stores. Even if you don’t use iTunes, you can view the list at www.apple.com/euro/itunes/charts/top10songs.html. “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt is number one …
Web localization is all about managing expectations. Patrick Hall pointed out to me yesterday that although Google offers an Amharic (www.google.com/intl/am) interface it apparently hasn’t actually indexed any Amharic content. Meanwhile, Yahoo!, without an Amharic interface, has indexed Amharic content. …
The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) just published a survey of the Chinese search engine market. Baidu comes out on top in market share. But Google is more popular among high-end users. And Baidu relies heavily on MP3 search …