Live Earth.org: From English to Zulu

I visited the Live Earth Web site today and was pleased to see that the site supports eight languages, including Chinese, Turkish, and Zulu. It appears that the languages were selected to be relevant to the locations of the concerts.

There’s not much depth to the languages — and some of the links take you right back to English content — but I did find some nicely translated PDF downloads on how to cut power consumption.

And now I’m going to get all picky about something. As many of you know, I’m a bit of a global navigation evangelist. And the language gateway is not well implemented.

See if you can tell what’s wrong:

Live Earth global gateway

As a rule, flags should not be used to denote language. The flag for South Africa could stand for any of the country’s 11 official languages.

I recommend removing the flags and using the language names instead (i.e., Español, Deutsch, etc.). It’s a much better way to manage user expectations.

Totally unrelated, I discovered that Live Earth is using a Web hosting service that relies completely on solar power: AISO.net. Perhaps other ISPs will follow their lead.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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