Global by Design

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 [...]

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We included 12 automotive brands in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.
And of the 12, Volkswagen emerged on top.
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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.
Here are the top 25 web sites overall:

Google

Facebook

Cisco Systems

Philips

Samsung

Wikipedia

3M

NIVEA

Symantec

Lenovo

Xbox

Autodesk

Gmail

Microsoft

Nokia

Intel

Caterpillar

Panasonic

HP

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu

LG

Volvo Group

Hotels.com

SAP

Kodak

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 [...]

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Last month, Rod Beckstrom, President of ICANN, spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Here’s the video. It’s a great introduction to how ICANN has evolved and where it’s headed. And, yes, Rod does talk about my favorite topic: IDNs!

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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Facebook, with support for more than 70 languages, promises to do very well in our 2010 Report Card.
That said, a week ago Facebook began rolling out a new design that includes what I believe to be a global design flaw — one that I hope is reversed in the months ahead.
Now, if you’ve been reading [...]

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