NOTE: The following is the beginning of an article I published with Multilingual Magazine recently. You can read the full article at the link below (free registration required). Twenty years ago, Yahoo! was the world’s leading search engine. It had…
Apple’s recent developer newsletter caught my eye because, for once, localization was featured at the top: Apple is providing free training sessions focused on Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan — markets that Apple has invested heavily in over the…
What’s the world’s most multilingual website? It’s not Facebook. Not Google. Not even Wikipedia. It’s the website of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, at just over 1,000 languages. But Google has been working since 2022 to leverage AI to take Google Translate…
Adobe pioneered the use of geolocation and localized overlays to improve the global user experience. As shown here, a visitor to the Adobe.com home page from Japan was greeted with the following overlay: The overlay allows the visitor to click…
A brief introduction to the 2024 Web Globalization Report Card…
As we say farewell to the Year of the Rabbit we greet the Year of the Dragon. And, with it, my whirlwind tour of global and local websites taking advantage of this holiday. And, yes, lots of celebratory red! Let’s…
For those of you keeping count this is number 20. Yes, as in 20 years. I’ll have much more to share about that later this year. But for now let’s focus on the next report. I’m in the middle of…
It’s not secret that China is going through an economic rough patch. So it’s probably not surprise that might brief tour of Singles Day website promotions came up lighter than usual. Compared with 2021, this year’s Singles Day is, well,…
I know it appears that I’m out to punish Mailchimp — as I first started calling out its rookie mistakes back in 2021. I am a paid subscriber so I feel as if I’ve at least earned the right. What…
I was in Ecuador recently and carved a bit of time to visit a few global websites — as in the .com address of global brands — to see just how successfully (or not) these brands localize for Ecuadorians. No…
I’ve announced the top 25 global websites from the 2023 Web Globalization Report Card. But that only tells part of the story. To better understand how companies compete against their peers, I grouped the websites into 13 categories — from…
When I see NA I generally think “not applicable.” Which was why I gave the Corpay global gateway a second look when I visited recently: Naturally, I clicked on the globe icon — which, by the way, is the perfect…
I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2023 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the 19th annual edition of the Report Card, yes, 19th. And while there are a number of very familiar faces in this list, there are some…
Lunar New Year is here and, with it, my whirlwind tour of global and local websites taking full advantage of this holiday. Here was my tour last year of the year of the tiger. Not surprisingly, the celebratory color red…
For many years, the addition of languages (as part of website localization) has ranked one of the least-promoted developments on any given website. Languages were added. End of story. Perhaps this is because localization teams have rarely been looked upon…