Someone is promoting the sale of a Chinese domain name, shown here. Technically, this domain is represented over the Internet as , which is the ASCII equivalent of the Chinese character — the DNS is still ASCII-only. In China, the…
File this post under Lost in (Machine) Translation. This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial. Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an English-language sign using machine translation (MT) software and, apparently, the…
It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world. As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later,…
Professor Nitish Singh, author of The Culturally Customized Web Site, has just launched a certificate program in Web globalization management through St. Louis University. You can learn more at www.globalizationexecutive.com.
For years I’ve been preaching the importance of the “global gateway” — the elements that Web sites use to seamlessly direct Web users to their localized Web sites and content, such as this splash global gateway: But there is a…
I recently came across a chart of the most popular domain extensions, compiled by Stephane Van Gelder. Although I keep track of ccTLD registrations for the Country Codes of the World map, Stephane tracks all domains, including .com, .net., etc.…
A commenter on my post on the stunning lack of languages on the Olympics Web site (particularly when compared with Euro 2008) notes that two more languages were added recently: Spanish and Arabic. Here are before and after shots of…
The NY Times reports that China has surpassed the US in terms of Internet users. This comes via China’s state-controlled Internet Network Information Center. Here are the key numbers: United States 220 million Internet users 70% penetration China 253 million…
Congratulations to Spain for emerging on top of Euro 2008. I can’t say that I was pulling for any one team, but I would have loved to have seen Germany score a last-second goal to keep the tournament alive. Being…
Nick Wilsdon at Multilingual Search quotes a Russian news story in which Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev says “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is…
I tried to login to Google Adwords recently and was met with the following “temporarily unavailable” Web page: The page illustrates one of the many the challenges of managing a Web site that supports so many languages. Even something supposedly…
As John wrote awhile back: All lucky numbers are local. And this is particularly true in China, where people pay thousands of dollars to obtain license plates with lucky numbers. So when it comes to naming products or setting prices,…
Here are some more localized Chinese Web sites that have gone black: McDonald’s Cisco Intel Oracle
If you visit the .com pages of Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and Amazon, you’ll see the usual bursts of color and promotional elements — that is, business as usual. But if you visit the Chinese home pages of these five…
There are tons of articles about Google vs. Baidu, but few of these articles take an in-depth look at how Google compares to Baidu from a Chinese user’s perspective. In this article, I do just that, and I render a…