Twitter and Web Globalization
ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish. http://twitter.com/icann_en …
Why Pay for Translation if You Can Get it for Free?
It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are …
Want to buy the number 8?
Someone is promoting the sale of a Chinese domain name, shown here. Technically, this domain is represented over the Internet as http://www.xn--45q.ws, which is the ASCII equivalent of the Chinese …
The Rise and Fall of Web Globalization
According to my search on “web globalization” in Google Timeline: I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000. From my humble …
How many Fortune 500 companies blog?
Curious to know how many big companies have embraced blogging? 81 of the Fortune 500 This is less than I would have guessed. As a comparison, roughly twice as many …
Have you dined at the Translate Server Error lately?
File this post under Lost in (Machine) Translation. This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial. Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an …
Per capita, Netherlands is the world’s ccTLD leader
The Netherlands, a country with just 16 million people, accounts for more than 3 million ccTLDs. That’s an impressive ratio of people to domains — one ccTLD per 5.3 people …
An iPhone app for lost souls
About six months ago, I began toying with the idea of biking to work. Driving from Seattle to Redmond is a minor nightmare because of traffic over the bridge. And …
Is this the next language icon?
Does this icon say “language” to you? It doesn’t to me. But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote …
Google Translate graduates to the home page
Only a few days after Microsoft announces a widget to bring machine translation into your Web site’s home page, Google takes a step towards integrating machine translation into its home …
Microsoft Translation Widget: Moving MT one step closer to the Web page
I’m happy to see Microsoft Research launch this new Web site widget. I’ll have to test it out on my site when I get the time — and would love …
Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world. As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though …
The Kindle forces the question: Is it bookworthy?
It doesn’t have backlighting. It doesn’t natively support PDFs. And it’s not cheap. And yet I still ended up getting the Kindle. It’s thinner than I expected and I really …
An iPhone game that I still haven’t won
I’m not very patient with games. Which is probably why I’m not very good. My brother has concocted a tile puzzle game for the iPhone, shown below, that I still …
Google Translate your PDF files
Google Translate now handles PDF files — says the unofficial Google blog. I haven’t tried it yet. It looks like you have to post PDF files and then link to …