According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the OK hand gesture is now a hate symbol. For those of us in the globalization field, we’ve learned to avoid this gesture in web and marketing materials for a more global reason — …
Lunar New Year has arrived and, with it, the Chinese New Year (and related Asian New Year celebrations). As I’ve done a few times in the past, I thought I’d feature a few localized web pages from multinationals as they …
Read moreThe Year of the Pig (one localized website at a time)
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 here? According to Skift, Marriott sent a survey in Mandarin …
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my newest book: Think Outside the Country: A Guide to Going Global and Succeeding in the Translation Economy. This book is the result of the past decade spent working with marketing and web …
The death of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej has led to stores running out of black and white clothing as the population mourns its leader in color-appropriate clothing. What does this mean for website localization? Consider the Thailand home pages for …
It’s well known that colors carrying different meanings in different cultures. The paint producer PPG Industries has released results from a global survey on car color preferences around the globe. And it turns out that car consumers in North America, …
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 company like Nike manage this heavily weighted word? Here are …