Web Globalization 2010: How Many Languages is Enough?
Languages are a means to an end, and in web globalization, languages help you expand your global reach. And global reach doesn’t always mean expanding beyond borders, it could also …
Languages
Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that
Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations? After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two …
Decyphering Google Translate on your web logs
Whenever I read this site’s web logs, I’m always fascinated by the number of referrals via Google Translate. Every month there seems to be more of them, which could mean …
TED is translation-worthy
Earlier this year, TED began recruiting volunteers to translate its recorded presentations, known as TED Talks. It looks like the venture is off to a strong start. According to TED, …
Type Russian without the keyboard
There are shortcuts on most English keyboards for entering characters such as á and é. But I can never seem to remember what those shortcuts are. Fortunately, there is TypeIt, …
Just how global is your browser?
Firefox 3.5 is now out and available in more than 70 languages. Yes, 70 languages. Naturally, I was curious to learn how many languages the other browsers currently support. Here …
Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
Bing recently added a nifty new translation feature — one that is so simple and in many ways so obvious that I can’t help wondering why Google never got around …
Why Pay for Translation if You Can Get it for Free?
It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are …
Is this the next language icon?
Does this icon say “language” to you? It doesn’t to me. But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote …
Google Translate now in 41 languages
Google marches ahead with its machine translation engine, adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician. This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in …
The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
I was on the Boingo Web site recently and I encountered a language picker with “English Intl.” listed as an option, as shown here: This was not the first Web …
The TAUS take on Google Translation Center
The post I wrote on the Google Translation Center has been the most-visited page on this blog over the past month. Clearly, Google has struck a nerve in the translation …
Has Google hit a language ceiling?
Google announced that they now have 30 products available in 30 languages. And many of these products, such as Gmail and Adwords, now support 40 languages. Here is a graph …
Google perpetuates the American .com myth
Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today. This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent …
Two thoughts on Euro 2008 and Web globalization
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 …