Is it Feta or is it Fake?
I knew there were strict rules about what constituted actual “champagne” but wasn’t aware there were also rules for feta. This from the EU: The label “feta” can only be …
Web Globalization
Japanese Culture 101
The students become the teachers with this wonderful site.
Democracy, Translated
According to this NY Times story, Vietnam is requiring that anyone who wants to launch a Web site get government permission first. Here’s the story. What jumped out at me …
Hello Bonjour Ciao Hola
If you’ve used the free machine translation site Babelfish, you know that it can be a little time consuming to translate one phrase into multiple languages. Carl Tashian has created …
A Brand By Any Other Name
A great interview with Andy Chuang of Goodcharacters.com in Fresno, California. His company specializes in Chinese naming and linguistic evaluation. The interview was conducted by Steve Rivkin; here’s an excerpt: …
Language is Power; Power is Language
According to a Sept. 28th article in the Economist, tensions between French and Dutch speakers in Belgium has been flaring up. Apparently, in the region around Brussels, French-speaking Walloons and …
Globalization of Beauty
In this NY Times article, thin is becoming beautiful in a country where just the opposite had been the case. Another reason to hate globalization, unless of course, you’re thin.
Of Flags and Gateways
When designing a global gateway – you generally want to avoid flags. After all, what flag would you use to represent Spanish? And what language would the flag for Switzerland …
Emerging Markets and Emerging Web Sites
The computer industry is in a slump. People aren’t upgrading their computers every 18 months and companies like Dell and Intel are rightly worried. Yet there is still hope to …
Flags in Search of Countries
Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) “UNPO is an international organisation created by nations and peoples around the world, who are not represented as such in the world´s principal international …
Accepting payment accross borders
Accepting payments in other currencies is a never-ending headache for companies, particularly small businesses. And although credit cards provide a nice alternative, many Europeans have yet to embrace them. So …
Vote, vota, bumoto…
“Los Angeles County is urging its citizens to vote, vota, bumoto or hay bo phieu. In fact, residents there will have seven languages to choose from when they cast their …
Only Just Getting Started
Just when you begin to think that the Internet has become a way of life for the planet, you read a few Internet usage stats from Nua. According to the …
Globalization Cuts Both Ways
Living in the U.S., it’s easy to take a one-sided view of globalization, where U.S. companies expand into foreign markets. But globalization cuts both ways, and I always love to …
Locales demystified
For a very good overview of the challenges of overcoming our current locales dilemma, check out Tex Texin’s presentation from the recent Unicode conference. I’m not sure there is going …