World Bank Adds Arabic Web Site (Finally)
Just in time for its meetings in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the World Bank has launched an Arabic-language Web site. You can visit the site at: www.albankaldawli.org (Note the localized …
Web Globalization
Unicode: Bigger and Better
The Unicode Consortion has released Version 4.0. For those not familiar with it, Unicode is “the fundamental specification for the representation of text, at the core of all modern software, …
An Intro to Indic Scripts
Richard Ishida provides an excellent introduction to Indic scripts, specifically Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. I’ve always found these scripts to be very intimidating and …
Monolingual vs. Multilingual Web Pages
Here is another fine Q&A from Richard Ishida of the World Wide Web Consortium Internationalization Group: What are the trade-offs between international sites that are monolingual vs. multilingual?
Worldwide Profits
A nice article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on how Web globalization benefits small business owners.
Revenge of the Non-Native English Speakers
Here is a very timely article on the growing relevance of multilingual, multicultural employees to the success of their companies within the U.S. and abroad. According to the article: No …
Globalizing CSS
As more and more Web sites make use of cascading style sheets (CSS), more and more Webmasters will struggle with localizing these sites into additional languages. Here is a valuable …
Who’s Using Unicode Right Now?
It it sometimes assumed that Unicode is a popular encoding “behind the scenes” but rarely used on the home pages of major corporate Web sites. While many major corporate Web …
Globalization Case Study
An excellent article on the challenges of running a global team: CNET News Here is an excerpt: Even when employees have good language skills, they naturally interpret written and verbal …
New Generation Latinos
Corporations, anxious for growth, are increasingly opening their eyes to the U.S. Latino market — a market that now has its own Web site: New Generation Latino Consortium. In the …
Retailers Awaken to Spanish Speakers
According to this article in USA Today, U.S. retailers are finally waking up to lucrative – and growing – market right under their noses: Hispanics. AOL, Nissan, and Office Depot …
Book Review: Creative Destruction
Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures is an important book. It’s also an accessible book, free of business jargon and consultant-speak. Tyler Cowen takes a very practical …
Globalization Resources
Microsoft has posted the presentations from the most recent Unicode conference online. While some presentations are a tad bit on the cryptic side, others are worth a look. I found …
The Last Days of Brand America
A few savvy American companies have known this for some time now, but it took the recent global protests of “American” products to make the rest of corporate America rethink …
Spanish Speakers and the Internet
The research firm comScore Networks just released the results of a survey of more than 50,000 U.S. Hispanic Web surfers. This study found that U.S. Hispanic Internet users outnumber the …