News and updates on the Web globalization newsletter Global By Design
The Jehovah’s Witnesses announced today that its website reached 1,000 languages, an impressive achievement. The release notes: On November 4, 2019, jw.org, the official website of Jehovah’s Witnesses, reached an unprecedented translation milestone—it now includes articles, videos, and audio content available…
Earlier this month, I wrote about Amazon and India. Now let’s look at Walmart and India, via Flipkart, the leading online marketplace in India. Walmart acquired 77 percent of the company last year. According to TechCrunch, Flipkart is (finally) adding…
Duolingo is an impressive language-learning app. I can’t say I’ve become fluent on any of the languages offered but I certainly enjoy sampling them. And now you can sample Arabic. Unfortunately, Duolingo continues to use flags for navigational purposes. Here…
Tesla was benchmarked in the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card. Of the 16 companies studied, Tesla finished in the lower half (higher scoring than Honda and Subaru, but still with a number of recommended improvements). Sadly, based on a recent…
Last year, I wrote an essay for Multilingual in which I noted that the world’s most multilingual website isn’t Google or Facebook or even Wikipedia. It is the website of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. As I noted in the essay: The JW.org website supports more than 675 written…
I had an OpEd published this week in the Los Angeles Times about the importance of languages — and the slow but steady increase in languages supported by the world’s leading brands… America’s biggest brands are increasingly multilingual
For the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 16 automotive websites: Audi BMW Chevrolet Ford Honda Hyundai Land Rover Lexus Mercedes Mini Nissan Subaru Tesla Toyota Volkswagen Volvo Cars This year, Volvo unseated BMW to emerge number…
A little more than 15 years ago, I began benchmarking websites for a new report I had in mind, tentatively titled the Web Globalization Report Card. The number one website in the first Report Card was a startup company by the…
Google Translate is the world’s most popular translation tool. The company says it now translates 30 trillion sentences a year across 103 languages. The key data point here is the 103 languages. No other free translation tool comes close to…
I’m pleased to say that, based on the websites I study regularly, we’ve reached “peak flag.” In other words, at a high level, companies are now beginning to move away from using flags on their websites within their global gateways.…
If you are flying the Taiwan flag on your website, consider yourself warned. By China. As I’ve written many times over the past year, China is paying close attention to how multinationals refer to Taiwan on their websites, not just…
If you don’t know what your mobile app weighs (in kilobytes), then it’s safe to say your emerging market strategy could use some tweaking. That’s not to be harsh, but to face the simple fact that mobile users in emerging…
I was happy to have an essay published in the recent issue of Multilingual. In the essay I write: While Wikipedia, Google and Facebook are among the leaders in languages at 298, 172 and 107 respectively, they don’t come even…
For quite some time people have asked me about creating a larger version of our Country Codes of the World map, something they could pin up in their conference rooms or on office walls. And a map without the legend,…
I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated my map of the world’s internationalized domain names for 2018: The map includes all ICANN-approved country code IDNs for the world — more than 50 across more than 30 countries and regions. I’ve…