Speaking Hinglish
The International Herald Tribune reports that English and Hindi have, for a variety of reasons, merged into a sort of lingua franca in a country with more than a dozen …
Countries
Amazon Adds China to Global Gateway
Amazon recently added China to its global gateway. The link to takes you to Joyo.com, a company Amazon acquired over the summer. It will be interesting to see if Amazon …
Xbox Globalization
Here is an interesting Q&A with Peter Moore, global marketing chief of Microsoft’s Xbox. They have offered a subscription-based, online Xbox service for a couple years now and we find …
Red Hat to Add Support for Indian Languages
Linux developer Red Hat says it will add five new languages to its next generation of enterprise software – all Indian languages. Equally important, Red Hat plans to offer customer …
Outsourcing: Looking Beyond India
This InfoWorld article cites a recent Gartner report that predicts that India will lose market share “from its current 80 percent to about 55 percent by 2007.” Who’s going to …
Microsoft’s Global Blunders
CNET News features an entertaining article on some of the creative ways that Microsoft has offended people around the world through cultural and linguistic blunders. These anecdotes come from a …
Googling China
The search engine war in China has long been heated, but Yahoo! recently upped the stakes with the launch of a new search portal: www.yisou.com. It sure looks a lot …
Localized Washing Machines
The Reveries Web site has an interesting piece on Whirlpool and its localization efforts in Latin America. Apparently the company has had great success in Brazil by creating a low-cost …
Chinese Hoops
According to a recent press release, last year more than 15 NBA teams incorporated Asian American marketing efforts into their overall marketing plans. And the timing isn’t due just to …
Pampering Russia
This is a great article about Procter & Gamble’s adventures in Russia. While currency devalatuations have been challenging, the economy has since stabilized and sales are growing at 50% annually …
Is Globalization Good?
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, people around the world generally approve of increased international trade. They also “think positively” of international and multinational organizations, such …
ICANN Goes Global — Gradually
Since its inception, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been criticized for favoring the U.S. over other countries. But with a new president in office, Australian Paul …
There is No Such Thing as “Rest of World”
Multilingual Computing has published a very useful supplement on best practices in Web globalization. You can download a copy here. The following is an excerpt from an article that I …
The Globalization of Google
Amy Campbell alerted me to a very interesting graphic on the Google Zeitgeist page. It tracks the languages used to access Google over the past two years: Google handles more …
A Brand By Any Other Name
A great interview with Andy Chuang of Goodcharacters.com in Fresno, California. His company specializes in Chinese naming and linguistic evaluation. The interview was conducted by Steve Rivkin; here’s an excerpt: …