Fonts in the cloud: Finding the most multilingual solution
For years, web designers have been restricted to a paltry range of fonts. It’s not that operating systems don’t support many fonts. They do. It’s just that web sites must …
Embedded text is untranslated text, courtesy of Google
Google Translate is a great tool for translating content on the fly — and on the cheap. And as Google noted in its blog, Poland’s Ministry of Economy is taking …
Google, Bing and Babelfish: What’s the best translation engine?
Two months ago I wrote about an effort to evaluate the quality of the three major free machine translation (MT) engines: Google Translate Bing (Microsoft) Translator Yahoo! Babelfish Ethan Shen …
iPhone app globalization: Ready for take-off
The WSJ has an article about iPhone developers taking their apps global. It’s very early days, but it’s safe to say that localization vendors are drooling over the possibilities. Although …
When machine translation and volunteer translators collide: A YouTube/TED case study
Google recently announced a rather nifty feature in YouTube: Auto-translation of auto-generated video captions. So not only is Google automatically transcribing the text of its videos, it’s also providing translations …
Is Google the best machine translation engine? It depends…
Two weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Babelfish — by relying on …
The best global web sites of 2010
I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. Here are the top 25 web sites overall: Google Facebook Cisco Systems Philips Samsung Wikipedia 3M NIVEA …
What’s the best free machine translation engine?
Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but …
Google may leave China, but don’t expect it to leave Chinese
Long before Google launched Google.cn, it launched the Chinese localized version of Google.com. And this site is alive and well and hosted outside of China’s great firewall. Just change your …
The most popular posts of 2009
With a few hours to spare, here are the most popular blog posts of 2009, based on number of visitors: The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American …
Google goes to Greenland to shorten your URL
Just what the world needs — two more URL shorteners. Google now has goo.gl. And Facebook has FB.me. But Google’s URL jumps out at me because it marks the first …
Google Korea: Before and After
For a Westerner like myself, the most-popular Korean portals Naver and Daum are a maze of text and images. The pages are too busy, too distracting. But I’m not the …
Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that
Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations? After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two …
There is no such thing as a global slogan
Here’s an article that confirms what consumers apparently know but many companies have yet to figure out — that English-language slogans don’t make much sense to people who don’t speak …
Google Translate: Now in 51 languages
In February of this year, Google Translate surpassed 40 languages. Six months later, Google added ten more languages, a two-year growth trajectory illustrated below: Google went from 13 languages to …