Global by Design

I flew to Japan recently and discovered that a new entertainment system had been installed on my flight.

But what made the system worth mentioning here was what I saw when the system activated…

A global gateway, shown here:

Global gateways, those little landing pages that ask you to select your country or language (or both, aren’t just limited to Web pages these days. Every screen is bound to feature one.

As more software is designed to be global from day one, we’ll see more of these screens.

And as global gateways go, this one was pretty good. The 15 languages were in the native script and there were no extraneous visual elements. The screen had just one purpose and one purpose only, which you don’t always find with global gateways. Some companies thrown marketing elements that actually diminish the usability of these screens.

One problem with this gateway was the fact that my language preference wasn’t captured for the duration of the flight. As I learned how to the use the interface I had to re-select my language a few times.

But what I found very interesting was that there were mini-gateways used for selected movies, as shown here:

In this case, the movie was available in several languages and I could choose which one, while still maintaining my English-language interface. I’m not sure how many people would choose a different language than their interface language, but it was still interesting to see what translation investments the studios had made on various films.

I would love to collect screen shots from other in-flight entertainment systems, to see how United’s system stacks up. If you’ve got any to share, please emal them to me.

• Global Gateway Notes
• Update on Best Western’s Global Gateway
• The “age gateway” comes of age
• Can You Find the Global Gateway?
• The creative side of global navigation
• Halo 3 Puts Age Before Language
• Alaska Air: Flying the Spanish Skies

It’s been about a month since my last post and I’ve got a good excuse for the radio silence:  I’ve been busy moving from San Diego to Seattle, selling a house, renting an apartment, and learning how to navigate my way through rush hour to Redmond.

Oh, and I started work at Microsoft as a program manager on the Global Product Development team in Global Foundation Services. The people here are passionate about Web globalization, which is what I’m going to be focused on.

Now, I should insert a disclaimer here: This is my personal blog and in no way related to my work for Microsoft. If I do blog about the company in the months ahead, it’s going to be my two cents only, and it will only be about publicly known products and developments.

I do plan to continue this blog. I have a backlog of Web globalization topics to publish and hopefully I’ll find some spare moments soon.

As for Byte Level Research — needless to say, I will not offering consulting services, and I have removed our “Services” section from the site. But my partner, Midge Raymond, will keep the company moving. She has some product ideas for the year ahead as well.

• Breaking News: Transware Acquires GlobalSight
• SDL On Track to be a $200 Million Company in 2007
• SDL Wins Microsoft
• Getting to Know Global IA
• Feed Pruning, or, The Zero-Sum Game of Blogging
• “Transcreation” Gaining Momentum
• Translation Agency Spam

According to Iran’s registry, the country reached 100,000 .ir registrations last month.

For a country of 65 million people, 100,000 registrations is still a drop in the bucket.

Compare that with the UK, a country with 60 million people and 6 million .uk registrations. Nevertheless, you gotta start somewhere, and I’m glad to see Iran slowly becoming a more visible part of the Internet.

It’s also worth noting that many Iranian sites use the .com address and many non-Iranian companies have registered .ir, such as Sony, located at www.sony.co.ir.

• One million .CN registrations in just one month
• .CN: From 2 million to 10 million in 12 months
• Japan joins the million domain club
• The world according to Google
• Vendor PR Blitz: SDL, Sony, TRADOS
• .AU reaches one million registrations
• Will .cn become the new .com?

The Society for New Communications Research has released a new study on the value of posting online press releases for all the world to see.

In the old days of journalism, the only people who saw press releases were journalists. They arrived by mail or fax and their purpose was fairly straightforward — to find their way into news articles. In smaller papers, sometimes these releases were reprinted as is.

But now that companies post press releases on their Web sites, these releases have come to serve many different audiences and many different purposes.

It turns out that getting news media attention is not the number one goal of an online press release.

The abstract from this study is now online. You can download it here.

• Marketing to Chuppies
• Global Web Site Review: Swagelok
• More Reasons to Localize for the US Hispanic Market…
• Web Localization Into English
• Young Asians Study
• Ford + AOL = Mi Negocio
• Lowe’s Conducts Bilingual Marketing Research

I was quoted briefly in an article in the Journal on the benefits of geolocation. Geolocation can be used to do many things, but I find it particularly useful in directing Web users to localized Web sites. You can read the article here.

• The MLB Uses Geolocation
• CMO Magazine: Lost in Translation
• The Best Global Web Sites (and why)
• The “age gateway” comes of age
• Of Global Consistency and Current Knowledge
• AT&T: Going Global Awkwardly
• MySpace China, Germany, and France This Summer?

Google Translate recently added 11 languages to its impressive portfolio of supported languages.

To give you an idea of just how aggressive Google has been in this area, here is a screen grab of Google Translate from 2006:

And here is one from today:

That’s roughly twice the number of languages in two years.

Microsoft has also been busy over the past year. Like Google, it now supports machine translation using its own in-house engine.

And it also offers a handy Web translation widget that you can insert into your Web page to allows users to self-translate your site into their language.

The portfolio of languages is still on the light side, but like I’ve mentioned before, these types of developments illustrate that machine translation (despite its inherent limitations) is becoming a critical piece of the Web globalization puzzle.

UPDATE: Here’s an interview with Google MT researcher Franz Och.

• Google Translate is growing up
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• Will Google Kill the Translation Industry?
• Hello Bonjour Ciao Hola

Inspired by our Country Codes of the World map, I developed a smaller version that includes the ccTLDs currently in use by Google for its local search engines.

As you can see here, Google has quite a few ccTLDs in use — more than 160, including Andorra, Kenya, Ukraine, and Ghana.

Why did I pick Google?

Because I know of no other company that hosts localized Web sites across so many different country codes. These may only be search engine interfaces, but they are still significant. While plenty of multinationals have registered hundreds of ccTLDs, few have put them to use so extensively.

And Google has room to grow — there are more than 250 ccTLDs available.

It’s also worth noting that Google redirects visitors to its .US domain to .COM, which I think is short-sighted. As I’ve written before, .COM is not synonymous with USA.

I have a few other companies in mind for this visual treatment. I’ll keep you posted.

This map is free and you can download a PDF here.

• Google perpetuates the American .com myth
• Say Goodbye to .YU
• Are You Master of Your Domains?
• Does .com = USA? Yahoo! Thinks So
• .AU reaches one million registrations
• .FR reaches one million registrations
• One million .CN registrations in just one month

The post I wrote on the Google Translation Center has been the most-visited page on this blog over the past month. Clearly, Google has struck a nerve in the translation industry — and its service is not even live yet.

The Translation Automation User Society does not appear to be as welcoming as I am of the Google Translation Center. A new essay on its site says:

Private companies will always seek world domination and customer lock-in. As a professional in the translation industry, the Google Translation Centre may help you on the short-term, but you only help Google long-term and you don’t help the world at all. Ultimately we pay the price for putting all translated words and sentences in the possession of a single company.

There is a distinct “evil empire” tone to this essay, which is understandable to a point. Google appears to be entering that evil empire stage of its development. Though I still use the search engine.

And the last I checked, Google’s “terms and services” page for the Translation Center had been taken down. So I can’t really say what Google’s policy will be regarding the translation memory (TM) that it may or may not leverage from this Center.

But it is no coincidence that TAUS is planning to develop a massive database of TMs of its own. I’m sure it wants readers to come away thinking that TAUS is going to be far more open with its TMs than Google will be.

TAUS says that its TM database will be free to the world for the looking up of translations of terms and phrases. But you’ll have to be a member to actually have access to the database (on a reciprocal basis) and membership is not free. I’m confident that this database will be of the highest quality as TAUS has some impressive corporate members, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle (Google does not appear to be a member).

Personally, I’m glad to see both services emerging — as well as services from Asia Online and Language Weaver (which is now offering a Web-based SaaS translation service). We are entering uncharted waters and it’s important to have a mix of large and small players, as well as a nonprofit, to keep everyone on their toes.

Is there a risk to the world if Google owns the world’s largest TM (which it might have already accomplished)?

Perhaps.

TAUS raises important questions. The answers have yet to emerge.

• Watch out ProZ, here comes Google Translation Center
• Translation Memory Sharing Gains Momentum
• The end of translation as we know it
• Will Google Kill the Translation Industry?
• Life Sciences Translation Demand Booming
• Google and the Global Traveler
• Idiom Summit Highlights: Momentum and More Acronyms

For years I’ve been preaching the importance of the “global gateway” — the elements that Web sites use to seamlessly direct Web users to their localized Web sites and content, such as this splash global gateway:

But there is a different type of gateway out there that is worth mentioning — a gateway unique to the Web sites of alcoholic beverages: the age gateway.

Here is the age gateway of Budweiser:

The age gateway has to be one of the most useless gateways ever devised — and certainly one of the most frustrating to use.

For starters, every beer maker seems to have its own take on how best to design the gateway. The gateways are usually Flash-based and typically difficult to use. What I end up doing is simply entering 01/01/1971 just to get through it as quickly as possible.

I would predict that the logs of Budweiser feature an inordinately high number of people born on the first day of the year.

But the reason why I’m mentioning the age gateway here is two-fold. In the case of Budweiser (and most competitive Web sites), the age gateway comes before the global gateway.

Once you get past the “virtual bouncer” and into the Budweiser site, in order to find your specific country or language Web site, you must do a bit of searching. Here is the buried link:

This link takes you to this page:

According to Budweiser, “great taste knows no boundaries.” But great global design apparently does run up against a few boundaries. For a non-English speaker, getting to this gateway is no trivial task.

What’s the lesson here?

Don’t place the age gateway before the global gateway.

Let the Web user find his or her localized Web site before you present your virtual bouncer. This is particularly important because dates are not presented in the same format in all countries. By directing the user to his or her local site first, you can then present your age gateway in the correct date format.

And, as my brother pointed out, different countries have different drinking ages — yet another reason to put the global gateway before the age gateway.

Now for the second point I wanted to make regarding age gateways.

Not long ago I came across a new product known as the Beertender. It’s a sort of mini-keg fridge designed specifically for Heineken.

Take a moment to visit www.beertender.com and you’ll first encounter this splash global gateway:

It is not until you select a country that you arrive at an age gateway.To my knowledge, Heineken is the first company to place its global gateway ahead of the age gateway!

If you select the French site, you’ll arrive at a very simple yes/no age gateway:

But because American lawyers are not as freewheeling as the French in regards to underage drinking, here is the American age gateway:

But even here you’ll find that Beertender makes significant usability improvements. Instead of asking the user to input dates, you simply select the dates displayed on the screen. It’s remarkably faster to get through.

So it’s nice to see Beertender not only put its global gateway ahead of its age gateway, but also support localized and user-friendly age gateways. I hope the other beer makers of the world take notice.

• The creative side of global navigation
• Halo 3 Puts Age Before Language
• A Few Global Gateways
• Update on Best Western’s Global Gateway
• The Best Global Web Sites (and why)
• Belkin: Using Unicode to Create a More Global Gateway
• Global Gateway Lessons From Japan

Is it just me or does the new Google Chrome icon remind you of the old Simon game of the 1980s. Yes, I know I’m dating myself here, but I do see a resemblance…

• Changing the face of the Internet — one ccTLD at a time
• Taking Video Games Global
• TypePad Adds Globe Icon to Globel Gateway
• Baidu.co.jp? China’s Leading Search Engine Eyeing Japan
• It Is Time We Standardize Global Web Navigation
• Video Game Localization Becoming Big Business
• Google Cashes Out of Baidu