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 was this mention of what happened to someone for posting …
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 handy workaround that takes care of the heavy lifting. …
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: For example, Toshiba once had a commercial song in China …
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 Dutch-speaking Flemings live side by side. Dutch has long been …
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 indicate – a country with four official languages? Well, for …
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 be had in “emerging markets.” Here’s what the president of …
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 organisations, such as the United Nations.”
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 PayPal will soon allow you to transfer money in Euros, …