Welcome to the Kingdom of eSwatini, formerly known as Swaziland
When I read about Swaziland’s recent name change, by decree, my first thought was: What about the country code? As in .sz? As far as I can tell, it’s way …
A unique look at the emerging multilingual Internet
I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated my map of the world’s internationalized domain names for 2018: The map includes all ICANN-approved country code IDNs for the world — more …
BMW: The best global automotive website of 2018
For the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 16 automotive websites: Audi BMW Chevrolet Ford Honda Hyundai Land Rover Lexus Mercedes Mini Nissan Subaru Tesla Toyota Volkswagen …
Amazon Translate joins the machine translation crowd
Amazon announced earlier this week that it had made its home-grown Amazon Translate service generally available. Like other Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can leverage the service across websites, apps, …
The globe icon has gone mainstream in global gateways
As readers of this blog know well, I’ve been advocating for the generic globe icon for use in the global gateway for some time. I first called for the globe …
A (free) font to celebrate Lithuanian independence
As a font geek, I loved this promotion courtesy of the Republic of Lithuania to develop a font that draws on the signatures from the Act of Independence of Lithuania. …
The Chinese Typewriter
I recently read The Chinese Typewriter by Thomas S. Mullaney. I love typewriters and languages, so this book was a sure thing as my interests go. And I learned a great …
Apple adds geolocation to improve its global gateway strategy
Apple has redesigned its website many times over the past decade but one thing has remained largely unchanged — its global gateway strategy. Here’s a screen shot of the global …
Think Outside the Country (now available in Japanese)
I received my copies of the Japanese edition of Think Outside the Country and am very impressed. The book, like the English edition, is in full color and uses high quality paper. …
Is your vendor putting your international business in jeopardy?
You hire a vendor to conduct a global survey. And let’s suppose this vendor refers to Taiwan as a country and the email goes out to people in China who …
The top 25 websites from the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card
I’m excited to announce the publication of The 2018 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the most ambitious report I’ve written so far and it sheds light on a number of new …
It’s coming…
The 2018 Web Globalization Report Card is well underway and I expect it to publish in February. You can preorder now. Lots more to come. For starters, it is looking …
Marriott in China: Website still down two weeks later (and three takeaways)
The Marriott website was taken down in China and Taiwan on or around January 11th. You can read why here. And here we are two weeks later and the websites …
Can displaying the Taiwan flag get your website shut down in China?
The short answer: It depends. The context of how you display this flag can make all the difference; for example, do you display the flag on a global gateway with …
Marriott’s China websites get shut down — and your website could as well if you’re not careful
If you visit Marriott’s China website today you’re likely to see this: I dumped the text into Google Translate and here is what it loosely says: So what exactly happened …