Global by Design

After three weeks of analyzing Web sites for the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, a number of interesting trends are coming together, and I thought I’d share a couple of them with you…

Geolocation is gaining momentum

PricewaterhouseCoopers is now using geolocation to improve global content delivery. So too is Audi. And we have yet to detect a company that has stopped using it. We’ve advocated geolocation for many years, but not before having a solid visual global gateway in place, which many companies do not yet have.

We still love the Caterpillar gateway:

Companies keep adding languages

It’s looking as if we’ll see an average increase in number of languages supported across all web sites studied so far. And this will be significant because a number of companies have actually reduced the number of languages they support, also a notable trend.

Hotels.com has more than doubled the number of languages it supports, to more than 30. Apple also boosted its global reach over the past 18 months, a sign of its global ambitions.

And now back to the web sites. Still more to analyze…stay tuned.

• The Best Global Web Sites of 2007
• The best global Web sites of 2008
• The Web Globalization Report Card 2010
• The Best Global Web Sites (and why)
• Thrifty Begins Web Globalization Journey
• iGoogle: Now in 42 Languages

In response to the earthquake in Haiti, Microsoft quickly expanded its machine translation engine to include Haitian Creole.

Today I noticed that Google has an alpha version of its Haitian Creole engine as well.

Though it’s sad that it took a natural disaster to spur attention to a particular language, I’m glad to see the language available.

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of readily accessible machine translation. Just as search engines help us better understand the world, machine translation engines help us better understand one another.

And, yes, they’re far from perfect. But they’re far better than nothing at all. And they are finding their way into countless applications and countless fixed and mobile devices, each additional language offering another glimpse into another world.

• A New Way to Measure Return on Translation
• Google’s Cross Language Search Coming “Soon”
• Finally, A Search Engine For Bilinguals
• Machine translation gets specialized
• Wikipedia vs. Google
• The Globalization of Google

I came across an interesting presentation today via Carla Briceno. The survey, sponsored by AOL and conducted by Cheskin, was based on interviewing more than a thousand Hispanic households across the US about how they view and use the Internet.

First some data points. Looking ahead at the 2010 census:

• 50 Million Hispanics will be living in the US
• Nearly one in six US residents will be Hispanis
• Los Angeles County is expected to be home to the largest Hispanic population in the US – exceeding that of Costa Rica

Two slides jumped out at me. The first slide noted:

Only 3% of respondents found Spanish language sites more trustworthy and useful than those in English, leaving an important percentage of the Hispanic segment feeling underserved.

Why? Because all too often localized Hispanic sites are simply literal translations of the English sites. And these web users want much more than literal translation. After all, most of them can migrate easily between English and Spanish sites.

So what exactly do they want from the Spanish sites?

The following slide sums it up:

You can download the survey here.

• Spanish Speakers and the Internet
• Hispanic vs. Latino? Survey says…
• Corpse Bride En Español
• ¿Habla Spanglish?
• Office Depot en Español
• Ford + AOL = Mi Negocio

ICANN shed some light on its fast-track application process today, announcing the first four countries to pass the string evaluation of the process.

Here they are:

• Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
• Egypt (EG): مصر
• United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
• Russian Federation (RU): рф

I’m surprised to see China absent from this list. But there are 12 other requests behind these four.

I know it’s way too early to start predicting the rise of the Arabic-language Internet, but it’s exciting to see such interest in the Middle East.

Here’s the ICANN press release.

• IDNs get on the fast track
• IDNs become a presidential issue
• IDN application update: Egypt, Russia, China…
• Multilingual Domain Names Redux
• The coming gTLD explosion (or not)
• Language Weaver adds language pairs

Long before Google launched Google.cn, it launched the Chinese localized version of Google.com.

And this site is alive and well and hosted outside of China’s great firewall.

Just change your browser’s language preference to Chinese and you’ll see it the next time you visit Google.

And had China not continually blocked this site from Chinese citizens years ago, perhaps Google would not have compromised so to enter the market.

But it did. Its services got blocked anyway. And Baidu is still number one.

Here’s a good article that posits that Google’s Korea strategy is what led to what is happening right now with China.

• Google Cashes Out of Baidu
• Baidu.co.jp? China’s Leading Search Engine Eyeing Japan
• Baidu Beating Google in China
• Can Baidu Out-Google Google?
• Baidu vs. Google: Round Two
• The year of Google vs. Baidu