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 …
Companies
Twitter launches translation crowdsourcing, again
Twitter went live with its newly updated translation center today. This is the second iteration of the platform; it first launched in October 2009, but was closed less than a …
Best global hotel web site of 2011: Accor Hotels
We included nine hotel and resort web sites in the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and …
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 …
Think your translator is cutting corners? Try the machine translation detector…
Lior Libman of One Hour Translation has released a web tool that you can use to quickly determine if text was translated by one of the three major machine translation …
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 …
Is Apple giving up on flags?
Apple has been using flags as part of its global gateway for many years. In 2006, Apple’s global gateway was positioned in the footer and featured a different flag for …
Setting up FaceTime for Mac-to-Mac chats
I interrupt this blog for a brief tutorial on how to use FaceTime for a Mac-to-Mac video chat. Apple has made lots of noise about how iPhone 4 users can …
Who says Latin’s a dead language?
Thanks to Google Translate, the language is alive and ready for copy and pasting. Link
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 …
English