(Insert company name here) stumbles in China
From the article Groupon stumbles in China in The Wall Street Journal: Foreign Internet companies have long struggled in China, which has more Internet users than any other country. Yahoo Inc., one …
Yandex headed to Turkey, and beyond
Now that Yandex is a public company there is much speculation about which markets the search engine known as Russia’s Google plans to expand into next. You don’t have to …
Web design with the world in mind
I was interviewed recently by Paul Sawers of The Next Web. He wrote a great article about the challenges and opportunities of web internationalization. I recommend sending this link to …
Language negotiation in a mobile world: Improving the global user experience
Language negotiation is the process of detecting the language setting of a web browser and responding with the matching language, if available. Companies such as Google and Facebook have used …
Can Google Translate improve your love life?
According to this Google Demo, featuring Nice Peter, it can (to a point)… [yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfTNJtOL4hM&tracker=False’] Of course, I would have ended this video differently — with a mistranslation or two. …
Walking through jelly
Just because a global company mandates one “global” language doesn’t mean that everything will run smoothly. English is typically the global language selected, which is nice for those who were …
Global by Design turns 1,000
In 2002, I launched this blog. It was the first blog devoted to web globalization. In fact, I don’t believe there were any blogs devoted to translation either at that …
Google Translate App for iPhone: Will it hit number 1? (Answer: Yes!)
I’m a little amazed by all the press that the Google Translate app for iPhone is getting today. From The Wall Street Journal to the LA Times, this app is …
The Top 25 Global Web Sites of 2011
I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card. This year, we reviewed 250 web sites across 25 industries. The web sites represent nearly half of …
Facebook is the best global web site of 2011
Analysis for The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card is now complete, and Facebook has emerged in first place, narrowly edging out Google. Last year, Google and Facebook tied for first …
Previewing the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card
I’ve begun work on the 7th edition of the Report Card. To produce this report I individually review more than 200 global web sites across more than 20 industries. Needless …
Translation in the next century
Jaap van der Meer of TAUS wrote a great article on translation in the next century. A few choice quotes: In this new regime, translation is multidirectional, from any language …
Inside Google’s language detection tool
One of the highlights of attending the 2010 Unicode Conference was listening to Richard Sites explain how he developed Google’s statistical language detection algorithm. You may have already used this …
The next Internet revolution will not be in English
This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions. Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range …
Who says Latin’s a dead language?
Thanks to Google Translate, the language is alive and ready for copy and pasting. Link