The internet may connect devices, but language connects people.

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

The best global websites from the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card

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 …

Read more

It’s time for your website to go flag free

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 …

Read more

What’s the world’s most multilingual website? (2018 update)

A few months ago, 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 …

Read more

Welcome to the driver’s seat: Which automakers are doing the best job of welcoming female drivers in Saudi Arabia

It’s been a month since women have been legally allowed to drive in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and I wanted to get a sense for how this massive new audience of drivers was being welcomed by the world’s automakers. …

Read more

To create a world-ready mobile app, think small, as in “lite”

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 …

Read more

Globalia illustrates why your global gateway should be in the header

Globalia is the leading travel company in Spain, generating 3.5 billion euros in revenues across more than a dozen brands. I visited the global website recently and noticed something missing from the home page — my native language. Not surprisingly, …

Read more

Speaking in Tongues: Corporate America needs to get religious about languages

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 …

Read more

Think you can succeed in India supporting English only? Think again.

#serveinmylanguage It’s more than a hashtag; it’s a social movement. And it’s growing. A movement among Indian consumers to force the vendors who depend on their business to actually support their native languages. As this Times of India article notes: From ATMs …

Read more