Displaying mathematical and scientific symbols on Web pages – and elsewhere – has always been a challenge due to lack of font support. That’s about to change. The folks at six organizations — the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American…
XML, by default, requires Unicode. Which is a very good thing. But other than that, XML is only as global as we make it. Enter the Free Standard Group. They’re working on the Common XML Locale Repository. It’s a mouthfull,…
In Japanese, “docomo” means “anywhere,” but now it might just mean “any word” as well. NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan’s top mobile carrier, said on Friday it plans to begin sales of a new ultra-thin mobile phone equipped with a 400,000-word…
Well, it appears that McDonald’s has fallen on hard times. According to the New York Times, it is “pulling out of three countries and closing restaurants in about 10 other nations as part of a restructuring aimed at righting its…
Want to know a big reason why Amazon is doing well these days? According to this article: Sales rose 33 percent to $851 million, helped by growth of some 90 percent from its international sites, most of which was powered…
According to Global Reach’s latest statistics on the use of language online, only 36.5 percent of the global online population are native English speakers.
A few months back I wrote an article for Multilingual Computing about large translation vendors launching translation portals. I profiled Berlitz and Bowne, and right about the time the article came out, Bowne went out and bought the Berlitz translation…
China’s Internet development is expected to receive a boost in December when the .cn domain name will be made available to businesses outside China under a new liberalized policy. According to the China Daily, there are 130,000 .cn domains registered,…
Want to irritate your Spanish and English teachers at the same time? Try a little Spanglish. Here’s a recent Associated Press article… ”Language is not controlled by a small group of academics that decide what the words are that we…
In a global marketplace, the odds of a new brand name offending somebody somewhere multiply significantly. Do your homework before taking a brand name into new markets. And read Steve Rivkin’s Naming Newsletter. Here’s a recent excerpt: In August 2002,…
In a draft accord released early on Friday, the EU endorsed a recommendation by its executive arm, the Euroepan Commission, that the 10 candidate countries “fulfill the political criteria and will be able to fulfill the economic criteria and to…
“With more than 42.5 million people of Hispanic descent in the United States, representing nearly 15 percent of the entire population, it’s important for us to provide this valuable audience with the choice of receiving BellSouth’s high-quality services either in…
According to this recent NY Times article, the State Department is launching an ad campaign to promote “American values” to the Muslim world: Special efforts will be made to give audiences here in Indonesia, elsewhere in Asia and in the…
According to a new report by Allied Business, the translation industry is showin no signs of slowing down. They predict translation revenues will reach $9.5 billion annually by year-end 2002: Web Site localization the business of translating Web Sites…
Registering top-level domain names can be a little confusing. There are country-code domain names (TLDs), like .de for Germany and .jp for Japan, and then there are the generic TLDs, like .com and .net. But be warned that there are…