Author Archives: John Yunker

From Morocco to Malaysia, IDN growth continues

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ICANN recently approved Malaysia’s Arabic IDN (internationalized domain name), bringing the number of countries or territories with approved IDNs to 29. Here is the full list.

As shown here, Malaysia joins a growing club of IDN holders!

 

And here’s a visual that I find striking — a view of IDNs only:

These are all valid top-level domains — and they foreshadow what the top level of the Internet will look like in the decades ahead.

(Granted, IDN approval has little do with IDN adoption and usage, but it’s a start.)

By the way, I’ve gotten a number of requests for custom versions of the IDN map lately. I’m happy to produce them. If you have something in mind, contact me.

 

ADP’s global gateway combines globe and flag icons

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Payroll services company ADP demonstrates that you don’t necessarily have to choose between using a flag icon or using a globe icon on your global gateway.

As shown below, the company uses both:

And here is the Brazil home page:

I don’t typically recommend using both a globe icon and a map icon. I believe a globe icon alone is sufficient.

But if you have to choose between using neither or both, choose both.

For more on global gateways, check out the book.

Global gateway notes: Guidewire, Google, Locaria

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One of the many things I love about global gateways is that I never stop discovering new ones.

Here are notes on a few gateways I’ve stumbled across over the past few weeks.

Let’s begin with a gateway that exhibits a classic rookie mistake:

I’m sure you spotted it right away — flags should never be used to indicate language.

Companies that use flags in this manner tend to be companies that are just getting started with web localization. In some cases, these flags come packaged as widgets (usually combined with a Google Translate backend).  I’ve come to believe that this is just one of these practices that companies have to grow out of.  And most do, over time.

 

Guidewire

Guidewire’s gateway wisely does not use flags. And it is also perfectly positioned in the upper righthand corner of the web site.

But when you click on the pull-down menu, you see an inconsistently displayed list of languages.


Notice how French and German are in their native languages, but Japanese and Chinese are not.

I’ve noticed a number of global gateways in which the Asian scripts are not presented in their native scripts. Years ago, this was because the web team didn’t want to specify Unicode on the home page. Today, however, I view this largely as an oversight. Interestingly, the Guidewire China web site features a globe icon next to its gateway. Looking ahead, I’d love to see this icon added to the .com site as well.

 

Google Plus

Speaking of globe icons, I discovered this icon at the bottom of the Google Plus home page:


As for the menu itself, the languages are natively presented, which is always nice to see:

But pull-down menus are not all that pleasant to scroll through when they’re long, and this one is indeed quite long. Interestingly, Google already has an alternative to the pull-down menu in place on YouTube (here’s an excerpt from the language menu):

Instead of a pull-down menu, YouTube uses an overlay, which bypasses the scrolling issue. I’ve been told that Google is working hard to merge these disparate global gateways into a seamless and user-friendly whole. Perhaps we’ll see progress by the end of this year.

 

Locaria

Translation agencies should be expected to provide user-friendly multilingual navigation. And while this approach by Locaria isn’t the most scalable, it’s visually engaging and, fun to toy with. I imagine it’s a great device for making potential clients aware of all the languages the company supports.

Have you encountered any must-see gateways lately? If so, let me know!

Secrets of well-travelled web sites: Web globalization in the travel & hospitality industry

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I’m pleased to announce a new report focused on the globalization of travel and hospitality web sites.

From Hotels.com to Delta Airlines to Expedia, this report highlights those web sites (and mobile apps) that have the widest global reach and are the most user friendly — regardless of the user’s language or nationality.

Lionbridge sponsored the production of this report and is making the report available for free (registration required).

Lionbridge suggested the web sites they wanted to see included but they did not play any role in the analysis of these sites. I’ve been studying many of these companies for years now through the Web Globalization Report Card. For this report I slightly modified the Report Card methodology to reflect the importance of offering localized their mobile apps and/or mobile-optimized web sites.

Even if your company is not a member of this industry, you may find this report valuable. Few industries have been doing more to go mobile than companies within this industry. And yet we’re still very much in the early days of what it means to provide localized apps and mobile sites. This report sheds light on what’s happening right now and what companies have done the best job so far.

In all, this report scores 44 companies across a six segments, including hotels, airlines, rental cars, and online travel agencies. Companies include Starwood Hotels, Delta, Jet Blue, Trip Advisor, Expedia, Hotels.com, Avis, Carnival, among others.

You can download your copy for free by registering here.

And I also have a webinar planned for October 26th. Mark your calendar!