Give me a .uk and hold the .co
Ever wonder why the UK home page for Amazon is located at amazon.co.uk and not simply amazon.uk? It’s one of those quirks of the domain name system. Countries have control over …
Apple iOS 6 provides a multilingual welcome
Apple provides a subtle, but global, welcome to new users of iOS 6. I just downloaded the OS today and captured a few screens to illustrate below: The only thing …
How Nike localizes “football”
In the US, football season has officially begun (there goes my weekends). But outside of the US, football season means something entirely different. So how does a global sporting goods …
Inspiration for the everyday writer
For a limited time, we’ve bundled together our popular typewriter notecards with Midge Raymond’s new book on writing. The bundle is just $25 while supplies last.
Listen to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (in 53 languages)
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into 370 languages Here’s the full list. But if you’re less into reading and more into listening, the folks at SoundCloud have …
Entering the Nike “language tunnel”
Nike has a brand new website and they’ve made a few navigational changes along the way. For starters, it appears that Nike is now using geolocation to detect the location …
English-only multinationals are a bad idea
You can decree that the employees of your company speak only English. You can train everyone. You can test everyone. And you can get everyone to speak English in meetings, …
Twitter’s multilingual error page
I’m not sure if Twitter has officially retired the “Fail Whale” landing page that we all grew accustomed to over the years. But I recently came across a Twitter error …
A map of the multilingual Internet
With Mongolia gaining approval for its new internationalized domain name (IDN), there are now 30 countries and territories with non-Latin top-level domains. I’ve updated my map and, as you can …
Gabble On: Using machine translation to learn a language
Ethan Shen, who has become quite an expert on the various machine translation (MT) engines, has launched a nifty web service designed to help you improve your language skills: Gabble …
Microsoft’s new web design — the bad and the good
Saw on Daring Fireball that Microsoft is previewing its new global website (link). Naturally, I wondered “Where the heck did the global gateway go?” It used to be in the …
For the love of typewriters
Awhile back I printed up a batch of typewriter notecards based on a typewriter I had rescued years ago. It turns out a lot people love these notecards, so we …
Mongolia joins the IDN club with .мон
ICANN has approved Mongolia’s IDN application. Here’s a one-page list of all approved IDNs — a list that now includes 30 countries/territories. IDNs are laying the groundwork for a revolution …
The problem with the Internet is that it’s too global…
From an interesting (and concerning) CircleID post by Milton Mueller: Three Chinese engineers are proposing a way to alter Internet standards to partition the Internet into autonomously administered national networks, using …
ICANN strikes domain name gold (updated)
The registration period for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), names like .google and .nyc, has been open for a short while and it appears that ICANN has won the lottery. According …