The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their web sites and applications for the world. It is now in its sixth edition.
Of the nine hotel/resort companies studied, the InterContinental Hotels Group emerged on top.
The corporate home page, www.ihg.com, is included below:
InterContinental is a conglomerate of seven hotel brands, including Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza.
The company does a nice job of positioning its global gateway in the upper right corner of not only its corporate home page, but also the home pages of its many brands.
Here is Crowne Plaza:
InterContinental:
And Holiday Inn:
There is still plenty of room for improvement. Notice the reference to “Queen’s English” in the Holiday Inn gateway. I’ve rarely seen this description used in a global gateway and I’d recommend against it. “British English” or “English UK” is more common.
Even though InterContinental emerged on top, it did not lead by much. Accor, Radisson, and Starwood all finished within a few points of it.
The hotel industry as a whole is not one I would call a leader in web globalization. Not yet.
Nearly all of the companies could improve on global consistency as well as depth of localization. I also found it odd that a few of the most global hotel chains supported so few languages. Hotel web sites support an average of just 10 languages — less than half the average of all 225 web sites studied.
Best Western stood apart, however, with support for more than 20 languages.
We did notice a number of incremental improvements since the last Report Card. For instance, two of the hotel web sites have since added support for geolocation. And I’m optimistic that we’ll see language growth accelerate this year as hotels step up their efforts to attract tourists from around the world.
There is reason for optimism — the World Tourism Organization forecasts growth in 2010, with more than one billion international arrivals.
Two weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Babelfish — by relying on translator reviews.
Ethan has provided me with a mid-point summary of results, which I’ve included below. I was surprised to find that Microsoft and Babelfish are beating Google on some languages pairs, as well as on shorter text strings. Although Google is emerging the overall winner — and receiving some much-deserved attention from the media — it’s nice to see some healthy competition.
That said, quality is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece — perhaps much more important — is usability. Now that Google has embedded its MT engine into Gmail and Reader — and now its Chrome client –I find I’m using Google exclusively as my MT engine.
Here are Ethan’s findings so far (emphasis mine):
At the highest level, it appears that survey participants prefer Google Translate’s results across the board.
In a few languages (Arabic, Polish, Dutch) the preference is overwhelming with votes for Google doubling its nearest competitor
However, once you remove voters that have self defined their fluency in the source or target language as “limited,” the contest becomes closer along some of the heavily trafficked languages. For example:
Microsoft Bing Translator leads in German
Yahoo! Babelfish leads in Chinese
Google maintains its lead in Spanish, Japanese, and French
Observing only the self-defined “limited fluency” voter reveals a strong brand bias. If your fluency in the target translation language is limited, it would stand to reason your ability to assess the quality of the translation is very limited. And yet…
Limited-fluency voters chose Google over Bing by 2 to 1
They also chose Google over Yahoo! Babelfish by 5 to 1
As I had guessed, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s hybrid rules-based MT model performed better on shorter text passages
For phrases below 50 characters, Google’s lead in Spanish, Japanese, and French disappear. And Microsoft’s lead in German widens.
Beyond 50 characters, Google’s relative performance seems to improve across the board.
For passages that are only one sentence, the same effect is seen, though to a lesser extent than under 50 characters.
On March 4th, we made a few changes to our survey – hiding the brands and randomizing the positions of the text results before voting. Since then, we have not yet collected enough data to draw conclusions, but Babelfish seems to be receiving the biggest boost, perhaps showing the effects of the recent neglect of that tool.
Clearly, Ethan needs more data to arrive at more concrete conclusions. If you’re a translator and you want to lend a hand, here is the voting site.
Volkswagen is one of the more globally consistent automotive web sites. In general, automotive sites are behind the curve in global consistency, so it was nice to see so many country sites leveraging the same global design template. Shown below are VW’s Italian and Finnish web sites:
Volkswagen also leads the category in global navigation, with a global gateway that is visually engaging, albeit a bit over-engineered, shown below.
Volkswagen also began supporting geolocation within the past 18 months, which is great to see, as it helps most users bypass the global gateway altogether.
While Volkswagen is ahead of its peers, you may have noticed that there were no automotive companies in the top 25 list.
The automotive industry is generally behind the curve in web globalization. And I should note that automotive web sites generally are ahead of the curve in language support; Toyota, for example, supports 41 languages.
But languages alone do not make a great global web site. Volkswagen did not lead in languages, but it did lead in a number of other categories, making it the best automotive web site of 2010.
In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization.
Oddly missing from that list was China’s IDN.
One of the reasons ICANN initiated a fast-track process — if not the reason — was China.
China began putting pressure on ICANN a few years back by registering second-level IDNs and hinting that it would offer full-length IDNs if ICANN didn’t get moving. China’s Internet is essentially an intranet after all, so there is no reason the country couldn’t resolve full-length IDNs next week if it wanted.
Perhaps China’s IDN has already been approved ICANN has simply not gotten around to announcing it.
Still, I find the silence curious. Which is why I was interested to read that the president of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, traveled to China recently.
This article posits that China’s IDN application was one of the issues behind his trip.
What do you think? Is China’s IDN being used as leverage by ICANN?
Languages are a means to an end, and in web globalization, languages help you expand your global reach.
And global reach doesn’t always mean expanding beyond borders, it could also mean expanding within borders — consider Spanish for the US (a trend that continues to tick upward).
That said, any executive with global aspirations is sure to wonder at one point or another: How many languages is enough?
It must seem that every year, the definition of “enough” inches upward.
The Web Globalization Report Card proves this to be true.
In 2003, when we began the Report Card, 10 languages was widely considered enough for a global web site.
Today, that baseline is 20+ languages.
As you can see below, the number of languages that companies support has steadily grown over the years. In the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card — in which we tabulated the languages of 225 global web sites across 21 industries — the average was 22 languages.
I’m not suggesting that companies add languages for the sake of adding languages.
But I do suggest that companies conduct regular “audits” of their own language mix, the languages supported by the competition, and the languages supported by the ecosystem as a whole.
I’d prefer to be the first company within a given industry to support a new language than the last. Only by keeping a close eye on languages and the competition can you achieve this goal.
Consider Russian. Five years ago, fewer than 40% of the major global web sites supported this language. At that point in time, a company might not have felt any pressure to localize for Russia simply because few other companies did so. Today, seven out of 10 companies now support Russian, which means that companies that hope to do business in Russia and do not support Russian are now in the minority.
Now let’s look at three companies in more detail: NIVEA, Starbucks, and Genzyme.
Each of these companies occupies a different industry sector and yet all three continue to add languages, each at its own pace.
We reviewed 225 web sites for the Report Card, which means 200 sites didn’t make the “cut.”
If your company is in this list of 200 and you want to know where you ranked, please contact me at jyunker (at) bytelevel (dot) com and I’ll provide that information.
I don’t want companies to buy this report simply to find out where they ranked. The goal of the report is to help companies get better — no matter what their score. This report even provided advice for Google to improve its score — and it ranked #1.
Google has emerged on top again, but just barely.
The big story this year is that Facebook and Google finished in a numerical tie. But because Google supports more languages (for now), it edged out as the winner.
Moving down the list, there are a number of familiar faces — companies like Cisco and Philips, Panasonic, and NIVEA. But there are some new faces as well. Samsung jumped up in the rankings due to improvements to global navigation and localization. Kodak, Symantec, and Autodesk are also new to the top 25.
Although these sites represent a wide range of industries, they all share a high degree of global consistency and impressive support for languages. They average 50 languages — which is more than twice the average for all 225 sites reviewed.
20+ languages is the new baseline
Even as we look across all 225 web sites, the number of languages continues to increase. Although the rate of language growth slowed over the past two years — due in large part to the global recession — growth continues. This year, the average number of languages increased to 22, up from 20 languages in 2008.
It wasn’t that long ago that any web site that supported 10 languages would have qualified as “global.” The new baseline is 20 or more languages, and climbing.
I will be posting additional findings in the days and weeks ahead. If you want to learn more, we’ve posted a brochure here.
Seventeen countries have applied for IDNs so far, but we only know the details on four of them:
Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
Egypt (EG): مصر
United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
Russian Federation (RU): рф
Yesterday, Bangladesh announced that it too had applied. Here is the domain the government selected:
বাংলা
There are 300 million Bangla speakers around the world who will potentially benefit from this domain.
To be clear, this domain has not yet received string approval from ICANN (the first four domains have been approved).
Here is the article that shows the prime minister of Bangladesh filing the application online. Yes, online, and no doubt after typing in an ASCII URL.
A year from now there will be full-length Bangla URLs.
This is getting interesting!
PS: If you’re seeing empty boxes above instead of Bangla characters, you don’t have the necessary font installed. This is one of the glaring differences between Windows and Mac. Below is a screen grab that shows Firefox on Mac on the left and IE8 on Windows 7 on the right.
Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but usually only when I want to compare engines. I haven’t used Babel Fish in years.
But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, but this is only based on anecdotal feedback and personal experience.
Years ago, IBM developed an algorithmic method of measuring MT quality known as the BLEU score. Google scored well here, but the BLEU score is not without its critics.
Translation, like writing itself, is as much an art as it is a science.
Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines. And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions.
Enter Ethan Shen and his start-up venture Gabble On.
Ethan has set out to recruit a few thousand volunteer translators to compare the three free translation engines. He asked me to help get out the word. He promises that he will publish the results for all to see. He’s also offering a free Apple iPad to one lucky volunteer. I have no financial interest in the project. I’m just curious to see what engine comes out on top.
Here are the details from Ethan:
We are seeking functional to fluent speakers of any two languages to take 5 minutes to judge and submit their opinion in our dynamic comparison engine (until March 29, 2010). At the end of the 6 week voting period, we will be publishing our results publicly in hopes that our research can to contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge in this field.
In gratitude for your participation, we are awarding one new Apple iPad to a lucky participant. The survey can be found at: www.gabble-on.com/SurveySelector.aspx.
