Select Country; Select Language
Just a quick note to highlight a guest article I wrote for UX Magazine on best practices in global gateways. Link
Month: December 2010
Previewing the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card
I’ve begun work on the 7th edition of the Report Card. To produce this report I individually review more than 200 global web sites across more than 20 industries. Needless to say, I’ve got a busy month ahead! I’ve already …
A hit iPhone app, via Armenia
When I first discovered the popular iPhone photo app Instagr.am, my first thought was: Look, another creative use of a country code! In this case, the country code in question is that of Armenia. What I found interesting about the …
Translation Sharing is Caring
The TAUS Data Association (TDA) was founded about two years ago with the goal of creating a widely used and trusted platform for companies to share their translation memories. The idea was that companies could achieve greater cost savings and …
Holiday Greetings from Lexiteria
Lexiteria, a unique word products and services company, licensed our world peace design and customized it with their logo and message. I’m biased naturally, but I really like this card! Multilingual design is a passion of mine and, though I …
Select Language(s): Facebook takes language settings to the next level
Facebook is updating its user profile page (profiled in-depth here) and one of the changes is to ask users to self-select one or more languages. Facebook already looks at the user’s web browser for an indication of what language he/she …
Translation in the next century
Jaap van der Meer of TAUS wrote a great article on translation in the next century. A few choice quotes: In this new regime, translation is multidirectional, from any language into any language. Quality requirements are different for different users …
Inside Google’s language detection tool
One of the highlights of attending the 2010 Unicode Conference was listening to Richard Sites explain how he developed Google’s statistical language detection algorithm. You may have already used this algorithm as part of Google Translate: The feature is also …
The next Internet revolution will not be in English
This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions. Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range of Arabic domains. I left off the Latin country code …
US opposes ICANN on gTLD rollout
Just as ICANN preps for the rollout of its much-hyped gTLD program, the US Dept. of Commerce comes along and makes a scene. I read the Dept. of Commerce letter and it basically says that ICANN hasn’t prepared fully for gTLDs …