English is THE Second Language
Newsweek International has published an article on the rise of English around the world. English instruction is a billion-dollar business and growing. But what’s most fascinating is that non-native English …
Translation
Web Globalization Gone Bad
The US Department of Defense is launching local “news” sites in an effort to counter what it believes is “misinformation” about the United States in the foreign media. One Web …
Global Seasons Greeting
Afrikaans > Een plesierige kersfees Arabic > I’D MIILAD SAID OUA SANA SAIDA Armenian > Shenoraavor Nor Dari yev Pari Gaghand Azeri > Tezze Iliniz Yahsi Olsun Basque > Zorionak …
Predicting 2005: From Amazon to Apple
As the end of 2004 draws near, I feel compelled to toss in a few predictions for the year ahead… Web Globalization Goes Mainstream Based on surveys Ive conducted, discussions …
Los Increibles
Cool News reports on some fairly sophisticated movie localization at Disney. The studio recently dubbed its hit movie The Incredibles for Argentina using well-known local personalities. This extra Argentine effort …
Google Is Best Global Web Site (Again)
All Web sites are, by default, global. But which Web sites do the best job of truly speaking to the world? That is, which Web sites support the most languages, …
Xbox En Español
For Microsoft’s video game Halo 2 to become a global success story, the game needed to be localized for the world. Easier said that done. JBL Localization issued a press …
Stop Speaking English!
According to this article, Quebec Premier Jean Charest has hinted that he might crack down on the spread of English in the workplace. Apparently French is losing its grip. albeit …
Finally, A Search Engine For Bilinguals
Just when I thought I’d seen every type of search engine, along comes Babelplex. Babelplex takes a search string, translates it into another language and searches on both languages at …
Engrish, The Book
You can find a Web site devoted to pretty much anything on the Internet. The Web site Enrgish.com is devoted to ” humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising …
All Lucky Numbers Are Local
Every culture has lucky and unlucky numbers. In the US, you’ll be hard-pressed to find the 13th floor in New York City. According to CNN, someone in China paid $215,000 …
Welsh Translation On The Fly
The BBC has launched a new feature for Welsh speakers who aren’t too fluent in English. The Web application is called Vocab. Here’s an article excerpt: Vocab lets users hold …
Language Weaver Scores More CIA Cash
Language Weaver, a San Diego-based developer of machine translation software, scored additional funding from In-Q-Tel, the VC arm of the CIA (yes, even the CIA likes to gamble). It appears …
Translating .com: It’s Not So Easy
John Klensin is one the original architects of the Internet. He first tackled the challenges of mulitilingual (internationalized) domain names many years ago. I interviewed him for an article in …