Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
Earlier this year, The Los Angeles Times ran a fascinating series on China and Africa and I only just got around to reading it. I recommend at least reading Part I. China is funding a massive railroad project connecting Addis …
Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins released her 2017 Internet Trends report today — the mother of all PowerPoint decks. I last commented on the 2014 deck. A few slides jumped out at me this year — as part of her in-depth focus …
I recently wrote an op-ed for the Seattle Times about the importance and value of thinking globally. Here’s an excerpt: Consider Starbucks. In 2003, this aspiring global company supported a mere three languages. Today, it supports 25, which may sound …
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my newest book: Think Outside the Country: A Guide to Going Global and Succeeding in the Translation Economy. This book is the result of the past decade spent working with marketing and web …
I’m pleased to announce the new book Think Outside the Country: A Guide to Going Global and Succeeding in the Translation Economy, due out on April 10th. Think Outside the Country is isn’t strictly about taking a website or mobile app global, …
I’m excited to announce the publication of The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the most ambitious report I’ve written so far and it sheds light on a number of new and established best practices in website globalization. Here are the …
First of all, I love tofu. But when you see it on a computer screen, it’s not so nice. Like those two rows of “tofu-shaped” objects shown below that indicate a missing font: Tofu used to be a much bigger problem …
I remember when Google Translate went live. Hard to believe it was 10 years ago. I remember thinking that this relatively new technology, known as Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), was going to change everything. At the time, many within the translation community were dismissive …
Google announced the launch of domains.google. today, not a new service but a newly “domained” service. I think it’s fitting that the first public use of .google is applied to its domains business. The question is: What other business lines will …
For the past 12 years, the Web Globalization Report Card has closely tracked the languages supported by the leading global websites, including companies such as Apple, IBM, 3M, GE, Microsoft, and Google. This year, the average number of languages supported by these …
As part of the 2016 Web Globalization Report Card I note the use of country codes among the world’s leading brands. It’s an imperfect process because different companies use country codes in different ways. For example, some websites use country codes …
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2016 Web Globalization Report Card and, with it, the top 25 websites: Google Facebook Wikipedia Hotels.com NIVEA Booking.com Nestlé Pampers Adobe …
A few years ago I wrote about the translation icon and its many variations at that point in time. I thought now would be a good time to revisit this icon. Let’s start with the Google Translate. This icon has not changed …
I read a brief report on digital Arabic content produced by the Wamda Research Lab, in partnership with Google and Taghreedat. A few data points jumped out at me, such as: By 2017 over half of the Arab world will have access …
Google Translate is the world’s most popular machine translation tool. And, despite predictions by many experts in the translation industry, the quality of Google Translate has improved nicely over the past decade. Not so good that professional translators are in any …