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…
Four years ago, for the Web Globalization Report Card, I began noting (and rewarding) those websites that supported mobile devices. Even then one could easily see the virtual grounds shifting in favor of mobile devices. But at the time, only about 20% of the…
Who said the life of a map maker isn’t interesting? Every other day it seems there is another disputed territory, which usually means another disputed name. I’ve already mentioned the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas issue. On the other side of the…
It’s official. Gmail supports (to a degree) non-Latin email addresses. That is, you can receive an email from someone with a non-Latin email address, as well as send an email to such an address. You cannot (yet) setup a Google…
This is the result of a massive investment of resources and expertise — and I’m excited they’ve made it open source. From Adobe: Source Han Sans, available in seven weights, is a typeface family which provides full support for Japanese, Korean, Traditional…
At the ICANN 50 conference Jordyn Buchanan of Google confirmed that Gmail would support EAI (email address internationalization) by the end of this month. This is significant news. But what does it mean exactly? I don’t have the details yet, but at…
It is being reported that Google is venturing into new territory by getting into the domain registration business. This isn’t completely accurate. Google dabbled its feet in domain registration years ago. And a few months ago Google began accepting registrations for its…
I too am surprised it took Google this long to launch a dedicated Thai website. YouTube has local versions in 61 countries and 61 different languages. Today’s launch in Thailand makes that the 62nd. Currently, there are over one billion…
My latest post for client Pitney Bowes on making sense of the hype concerning the new generic TLDs. An excerpt: The first wave is rolling in More than 1,200 gTLDs have been applied for so far. You can check the status…
When talking about language diversity across the Internet, I like to include a visual that illustrates the language leaders of the Internet: This chart is based on data from the 2014 Web Globalization Report Card. English (US) is not counted.…
I’ve long talked about the importance of non-Latin domain names, or IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names). Google has gone live with one if its many IDNs: みんな. I want to emphasize here that this is a top-level IDN — that is, the…
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. More than ten years ago I set out to create a report that benchmarked global websites. I looked at languages supported. I studied the localized websites. I interviewed the executives…
From Afrikaans to Zulu, the evolution of Google Translate is one of Google’s greatest success stories that few people fully appreciate. Perhaps because Google is reluctant to release usage data (which I imagine is significant). So Google now supports 80…
This screen is from a website advertising two new top level domains in Cyrillic. Here are the two domains and what they represent: .САЙТ (Website) .ОНЛАЙН (Online) Two other domains that were recently approved by ICANN were in Arabic and…