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…
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 received my copies of the Japanese edition of Think Outside the Country and am very impressed. The book, like the English edition, is in full color and uses high quality paper. The book is published by Born Digital (in collaboration with Mitsue-Links) You can…
I’m excited to announce the publication of The 2018 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the most ambitious report I’ve written so far and it sheds light on a number of new and established best practices in website globalization. First, here are…
The short answer: It depends. The context of how you display this flag can make all the difference; for example, do you display the flag on a global gateway with text that reads Select Country or Select Country/Region? This may seem…
I’m pleased to announce that Born Digital (in collaboration with Mitsue-Links) is publishing the Japanese edition of Think Outside the Country. The book will be available December 23rd and I look forward to promoting it next year! If you’re a…
I’m pleased to announce the new book Think Outside the Country: A Guide to Going Global and Succeeding in the Translation Economy, due out on April 10th. Think Outside the Country is isn’t strictly about taking a website or mobile app global,…
First of all, I love tofu. But when you see it on a computer screen, it’s not so nice. Like those two rows of “tofu-shaped” objects shown below that indicate a missing font: Tofu used to be a much bigger problem…
The proper display of dates for each locale has become relatively trivial with libraries such as Globalize and yet I still encounter websites that don’t get it right. Case in point, I recently visited a tech website looking for a firmware upgrade…
Today, the JQuery Foundation has announced availability of Globalize 1.0: Globalize provides developers with always up-to-date global number formatting and parsing, date and time formatting and parsing, currency formatting, and message formatting. Based on the Unicode Consortium standards and specifications, Globalize…
This blog has been hosted on WordPress since 2002. Since then, WordPress has grown into one of the dominant publishing platforms on the Internet. And one of the most multilingual as well, with strong support for 53 locales and limited…
I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile. A few months ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly said this at an investor meeting: “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don’t consider the…
I was intrigued to read recently that Mozilla is working on updating the Firefox Android mobile browser, codename Fennec, to allow the browser to offer more languages than the underlying Android system currently supports. Typically, apps leverage language support from the underlying operating system,…
I wrote recently that if you can make your product “translation worthy” the world will follow. Reading about Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp I went back and did some language crunching. In December 2012, WhatsApp supported 15 languages. I also noted…
From my guest post for Gigaom: When a software company asks me if I think its new product will succeed globally, I typically respond by asking: Is your product translation worthy? In other words, are people eager to voluntary translate…