Earlier this month, I wrote about Amazon and India. Now let’s look at Walmart and India, via Flipkart, the leading online marketplace in India. Walmart acquired 77 percent of the company last year. According to TechCrunch, Flipkart is (finally) adding…
Not a huge surprise given the lack of investment over the years and the rise of more full-featured competitors, but Google is shutting down its Translator Toolkit: Google Translator Toolkit launched over a decade ago to help our users, translators,…
In technology, as in life, actions speak louder than words. And if you look at the actions Amazon has been taking over the past 18 months, it’s clear that Amazon is heavily invested in succeeding in India. Consider the following…
Duolingo is an impressive language-learning app. I can’t say I’ve become fluent on any of the languages offered but I certainly enjoy sampling them. And now you can sample Arabic. Unfortunately, Duolingo continues to use flags for navigational purposes. Here…
Imagine if a Brazilian technology company created an online store called Appalachia. And, over the years, Appalachia.com grew to become a global giant, so much so that the company pursued exclusive ownership of the top-level domain Appalachia. So not only…
Thanks to a heads-up from Ali at CircleID, I discovered a new report by Oxford Information Labs (sponsored by the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries. The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) gave Oxford Information Labs…
I always enjoy skimming through Mary Meeker’s annual survey of global Internet trends (now via Bond Capital). What follows are a few slides that jumped out at me. Let’s begin with global Internet users. While Europe, North America and South…
Tesla was benchmarked in the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card. Of the 16 companies studied, Tesla finished in the lower half (higher scoring than Honda and Subaru, but still with a number of recommended improvements). Sadly, based on a recent…
Looks like the most recent WordPress Translation Day was a linguistic success. Here are the details from WP Tavern: Events in 35 countries (see map below) 183 new contributors 12 new global translation editors (GTEs) WordPress supports more than 200…
For the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following professional services websites: Accenture Capgemini Deloitte Ernst & Young Goldman Sachs KPMG PwC For the first year since we began the Report Card (in 2003), every company reviewed in…
For the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 13 enterprise technology websites: Autodesk Cisco Systems DHL FedEx HP Enterprise Huawei IBM Intel Oracle SAP Texas Instruments UPS Xerox Cisco Systems emerged on top this year. It launched…
I’ll be participating on May 1st at 11 am (Chicago time) in a one-hour Weggchat — responding to questions via Twitter. So if you have anything to ask me about taking your website or app global, send them my way…
Another one bites the dust in China (Amazon.cn), expanding upon my previous post on the challenges of succeeding in China. Wall Street Journal: Amazon’s E-Commerce Adventure in China Proved Too Much of a Jungle
Last year, 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 essay: The JW.org website supports more than 675 written…
Did you know that (US) English accounts for fewer than half of all WordPress interfaces currently in use? As you can see below, courtesy of WordPress, English still technically accounts for more than half when you include Australia, Canada, etc,…