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 …
Companies
Hotels.com and its global growth spurt
In the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, Hotels.com ranked close to last place in the web services category. In this year’s Report Card, Hotels.com ranked only behind Google and Wikipedia …
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 …
Apple iPhone 4 improves international support
The iPhone is a global success story. And one of the reasons for this success can be attributed to the device’s support for more than 30 languages. But with the …
LAN Airlines and its local Twitter feed
LAN Airlines is trying to expand its US presence. I’ve flown the airline once — back when it was known as LAN Chile. I received an email from them last week …
Have you localized your error messages?
While trying (and failing) to buy an iPhone this morning, I’ve encountered three different error screens. Here’s my favorite: I seriously doubt that “Oops!” has been localized for different markets. …
Twittering in Tongues: How companies are going global with Twitter
Over the past six months, Twitter went from mostly serving people based inside the US to mostly serving people based outside of the US. Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered …
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 …
Country code wallpaper for your iPhone
I realize I’m a bit obsessed with country codes. It’s a sickness, I know. After I created the Country Codes of the World map, I began looking at other platforms …
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 …
The best global hotel web site: InterContinental Hotels
We included nine hotel and resort brands in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize …
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 automotive web site: Volkswagen
We included 12 automotive brands in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. And of the 12, Volkswagen emerged on top. Volkswagen is one of the more globally consistent automotive web …
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 …