Three rules of global gateway design
It’s been awhile since I’ve written about global gateways — those landing pages and header elements that companies use to direct visitors to localized web sites. I came across one …
Web Globalization
Starbucks puts its web site where its growth is
Starbucks may be closing stores in the US, but it’s still growing internationally. According to the Seattle PI: Starbucks recently opened stores in the Czech Republic, Amsterdam and Poland. And …
The best mini-series you’ve probably never seen
The one-line description on Amazon says: Police detective Ronnie Craven investigates the killing of his own daughter and becomes embroiled in a vast conspiracy. Edge of Darkness is a 1985 …
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, …
Note to Google Books: Please rotate
I just noticed that the book I wrote several years ago Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies is now up on Google Books. I appears though that Google still has a …
Update on the World’s Number One Starbucks Fan
In 2005, I interviewed a man named Winter, who was on a quest to visit ever Starbucks location on this planet. Four years later, the quest continues. Unfortunately, as documented …
Twitter and Web Globalization
ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish. http://twitter.com/icann_en …
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 …
The Rise and Fall of Web Globalization
According to my search on “web globalization” in Google Timeline: I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000. From my humble …
How many Fortune 500 companies blog?
Curious to know how many big companies have embraced blogging? 81 of the Fortune 500 This is less than I would have guessed. As a comparison, roughly twice as many …
Have you dined at the Translate Server Error lately?
File this post under Lost in (Machine) Translation. This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial. Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an …
Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world. As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though …
Forgetting English
I’m thrilled to announce that Eastern Washington University Press has just published a short story collection by my wife, Midge Raymond: Forgetting English. Readers of this blog will certainly appreciate …
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 dawn of a new era
I was walking to the bus this evening in Redmond and I was waiting at a traffic light. A young man on a bicycle pulled up next to me. He …