Microsoft Translation Widget: Moving MT one step closer to the Web page
I’m happy to see Microsoft Research launch this new Web site widget. I’ll have to test it out on my site when I get the time — and would love …
John Yunker
Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world. As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though …
The Kindle forces the question: Is it bookworthy?
It doesn’t have backlighting. It doesn’t natively support PDFs. And it’s not cheap. And yet I still ended up getting the Kindle. It’s thinner than I expected and I really …
An iPhone game that I still haven’t won
I’m not very patient with games. Which is probably why I’m not very good. My brother has concocted a tile puzzle game for the iPhone, shown below, that I still …
Google Translate your PDF files
Google Translate now handles PDF files — says the unofficial Google blog. I haven’t tried it yet. It looks like you have to post PDF files and then link to …
How many TLDs are there?
I love this visual, via ICANN, a diagram of the world’s top-level domains (TLDs) — all 280 of them. The overwhelming majority of TLDs are country codes, most of which …
Google Translate now in 41 languages
Google marches ahead with its machine translation engine, adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician. This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in …
Is .NYC the next 212? Or is it the next .LA?
So it’s looking like .NYC may indeed come to fruition. It certainly has its proponents. Paris and Berlin are also pursuing their own domains. But the reason I see .NYC …
Forgetting English
I’m thrilled to announce that Eastern Washington University Press has just published a short story collection by my wife, Midge Raymond: Forgetting English. Readers of this blog will certainly appreciate …
The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
I was on the Boingo Web site recently and I encountered a language picker with “English Intl.” listed as an option, as shown here: This was not the first Web …
The dawn of a new era
I was walking to the bus this evening in Redmond and I was waiting at a traffic light. A young man on a bicycle pulled up next to me. He …
.EU: Three years and three million registrations
It’s been nearly three years since .EU went live. Stephane reports that the domain reached 3 million registrations today. Not too bad, considering that .US is still well under two …
Global user experience is much more than a Web site
I bought a LaCie hard drive recently, and I noticed an interesting gap between the global usability of the LaCie Web site and the installation software that shipped with the …
The long goodbye
Lately I’ve been trying to reduce some of the noise in my inbox by unsubscribing from a number of email newsletter lists. It hasn’t been easy. For example, I unsubscribed …
English