If you were to visit the US home page of BMW you’d see the obligatory photograph of the latest models: But if you were to visit the China home page of BMW, you’d encounter this fella: That’s right, even high-end …
Shutterstock recently published a global selection of color predictions. According to their blog, the predictions are based “millions of images downloaded from around the world, wherein each individual pixel shade is tallied—along with recent click-through rate (CTR) performance.” What jumped …
I suppose it was just a matter of time before the advertising algorithms figured I’d be in the market for a country code top-level domain (ccTLD), perhaps .CA. And so I happened upon this ad the other day: Choose.ca links …
Robert Frost wrote that good fences make good neighbors. Yet when it comes to virtual fences, visualized as maps, I’m not sure there is any way to create “good fences.” So many regions around the world are under dispute. And …
Web localization is a never-ending journey. And because the world is constantly changing, what worked yesterday may not be as effective tomorrow. Like this visual development in South Korea: When localizing for South Korea, avoid a “pinching fingers” image. From …
Fascinating article in the New York Times about an emerging generation of Chinese who are pushing back against the 996 (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week) work culture. A generation ago, the route to success in China …
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 …
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 …