Sizing the Translation Industry
According to a new report by Allied Business, the translation industry is showin no signs of slowing down. They predict translation revenues will reach $9.5 billion annually by year-end 2002: …
Con Artist.scot
Registering top-level domain names can be a little confusing. There are country-code domain names (TLDs), like .de for Germany and .jp for Japan, and then there are the generic TLDs, …
Going Global Gracefully
When companies first go global, they tend to select the richest foreign markets. After all, if you want to make money abroad, you follow the money abroad. Yet this strategy …
Language and Health Care
“Language is among the top three barriers to adequate health care, said Fred Hobby, director of the project and chief diversity officer at GHS. So with a $1 million grant …
Will Wal-Mart Ever Stop Growing?
Wal-Mart did $191 billion in revenues last year. By 2011, analysts expect it to hit $450 billion. It has more than 4,600 stores open around the world right now; it …
Spanish America
More than 10% of American residents now speak only Spanish at home, up from 7.5% in 1990, according Bill Frey, a senior fellow in demography at the Milken Institute. He …
The Great Global Safety Net
UPS is like a lot of American multinationals – its international business is not the core source of revenues, but is an increasingly vital source of revenues. This week, UPS …
Languages Living Together
After reading about languages doing battle in Romania, it’s nice to see that languages can coexist in Lebanon: Lebanon, a former French mandate country, is a good illustration of how …
No more “hot dogs” in Romania?
It’s not official yet, but there’s an interesting law in the works in Romania: It still awaits legal fine-tuning and presidential approval, but as it stands now, it dictates that …
Is it Feta or is it Fake?
I knew there were strict rules about what constituted actual “champagne” but wasn’t aware there were also rules for feta. This from the EU: The label “feta” can only be …
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 …
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 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: …
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 …