Local by design; global by accident
When I first visited Japan, I was struck by the range of local products made by the Japanese subsidiary of Coca-Cola, like Georgia Coffee (in a can, no less). This phenomenon is …
Countries
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 …
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 …
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 …
If Russians are wary of Cyrillic domains, who’s buying them?
About a year ago, the NY Times ran an article with the headline: Russians Wary of Cyrillic Web Domains. As someone who has long been bullish on the future of …
Gruber gives up on his ✪ IDN
Tech pundit John Gruber threw in the towel on his domain ✪df.ws. He writes: What I didn’t foresee was the tremendous amount of software out there that does not properly …
Amazon’s Kindle goes multilingual
The Kindle 3 was announced last evening. The big news about the device is the price — starting at $139. You could argue that this is the first mass-market e-reader. …
Chinese IDNs have arrived
ICANN gave approval to Chinese IDNs — for China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This is a significant development — particularly since China was one of the major forces pushing ICANN …
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 …
Adobe launches translation crowdsourcing in China
Facebook has demonstrated that you can crowdsource translations with high quality and rapid turnaround, leading many other companies to ask how they too can leverage the crowd to translate their …
For the love of Chinglish
As Shanghai cleans up its more humorous Chinese to English mistranslations, some folks are feeling wistful. Check out the NYT slideshow. Also, I was just told that the Telegraph has …
Where is China’s fast-track IDN?
In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization. Oddly missing from that list was …
Happy Chinese New Year
Let me guess. Year of the Tiger?
The first of the fast-track IDNs
ICANN shed some light on its fast-track application process today, announcing the first four countries to pass the string evaluation of the process. Here they are: Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية …
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 …