Interesting Global Gateway
RedDot, a maker of content management software, is using a rather unique global gateway, as shown here: Notice how it uses ISO-specific country abbreviations, such as PL for Poland, AU …
John Yunker
The New Old Globalization
An excellent editorial by Robert Wright in The New York Times about globalization. He does a wonderful job of showing how globalization is far from a new development, yet one …
Is Globalization Good?
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, people around the world generally approve of increased international trade. They also “think positively” of international and multinational organizations, such …
Scholastic en Español
With the publication of Madonna’s much-hyped children’s book, The English Roses (Las Rosas Inglesas), Scholastic is launching a Spanish-language imprint, Scholastic En Espanol. According to the press release, Hispanics currently …
World Wide Madonna
This article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) explains the logistics of Madonna’s foray into children’s publishing. Madonna has never done anything small, so why should her first children’s …
Law & Web Globalization
Thanks to Amy Campbell for pointing us to a note by Larry Bodine about the growing number of law firms with multilingual Web sites. Apparently, Jones Day says it is …
Nextel en Español
Nextel recently launched a Spanish-language site to better market to Hispanic customers. Here is the site: www.nextel.com/espanol. This is good first step. But Nextel still has a long way to …
Can You Find the Global Gateway?
I’m a strong advocate for “global gateways.” A global gateway is the term I used to refer to the navigation system that directs users to their language-specific or locale-specific Web …
World Bank Adds Arabic Web Site (Finally)
Just in time for its meetings in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the World Bank has launched an Arabic-language Web site. You can visit the site at: www.albankaldawli.org (Note the localized …
Unicode: Bigger and Better
The Unicode Consortion has released Version 4.0. For those not familiar with it, Unicode is “the fundamental specification for the representation of text, at the core of all modern software, …
An Intro to Indic Scripts
Richard Ishida provides an excellent introduction to Indic scripts, specifically Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. I’ve always found these scripts to be very intimidating and …
Monolingual vs. Multilingual Web Pages
Here is another fine Q&A from Richard Ishida of the World Wide Web Consortium Internationalization Group: What are the trade-offs between international sites that are monolingual vs. multilingual?
Worldwide Profits
A nice article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on how Web globalization benefits small business owners.
Revenge of the Non-Native English Speakers
Here is a very timely article on the growing relevance of multilingual, multicultural employees to the success of their companies within the U.S. and abroad. According to the article: No …