Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, the world’s largest auctioneer of heavy equipment and trucks, recently launched a redesigned (and more global) web site. Auction web sites are much like ecommerce web sites — that is, quite complex. You’ve got currencies and time zones and …
ICANN gave approval to Chinese IDNs — for China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This is a significant development — particularly since China was one of the major forces pushing ICANN to support IDNs. To give you an idea of how …
Awhile back, Anirvan Chatterjee, founder of BookFinder. emailed me to ask if I knew of any other religion web site that supported more languages than the site of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I didn’t. As shown in the screen grab below, …
A great quote from an interview with Tarun Khanna and Krishna G. Palepu, authors of the new book Winning in Emerging Markets: Multinationals based in developed countries as well as emerging market -based companies face a tension between ambition and …
LAN Airlines is trying to expand its US presence. I’ve flown the airline once — back when it was known as LAN Chile. I received an email from them last week in which they promoted their new Twitter page: What I …
The Translation Automation User Society has always been an organization that I’ve admired more in theory than in practice. That is, I admire the organization’s goal of broadly sharing translation memories (TM). But I’ve been less than enthusiastic about how …
While trying (and failing) to buy an iPhone this morning, I’ve encountered three different error screens. Here’s my favorite: I seriously doubt that “Oops!” has been localized for different markets. In fact, many companies overlook the localization of error messages. …
Over the past six months, Twitter went from mostly serving people based inside the US to mostly serving people based outside of the US. Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered users are based outside of the United States. And half …
As readers of this blog well know, I’ve been bullish on machine translation for quite some time. Way back in 2004, I wrote: Note to translators: I’m not implying you’ll be out of business anytime soon. But I am saying …