Category Archives: Arabic

Meet the next generation of country codes

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china_idn

So now that the media hype over internationalized domain names (IDNs) has died down, let’s focus on the messy details of what this all means.

First of all, we’re not about to see the non-Latin equivalent of .com anytime soon. Certainly not next year. There are several reason for this which I will cover in a later post.

What we should see next year are the non-Latin equivalents of country code top-level domains, such as .ru, .cn, .sa. It just so happens that I’ve got a handy map of all ccTLDs here.

Not all ccTLDs will be eligible for a “fast track” ccTLD, just those from countries that have official non-Latin languages.

The two largest countries I would expect to launch IDNs in 2010 are China and Russia.

China has had its IDN ready to go for some time now; the traditional Chinese character version is shown above. The simplified character version is below. The assumption is that both versions will be bundled together.

china_idn_simp

Below is a screen grab from China’s government web site. Perhaps in 2010 we’ll see “GOV.cn” replaced.

china_govt_domain

Russia will likely be using this IDN next year:

ru_idn

This IDN is short for “Russian Federation.” Why not just use the equivalent of .RU, you ask? Well, that would give us .ру, which looks entirely too similar to .py (Paraguay).

So there you have it — IDNs for China and Russia, with many more to follow.

United Airlines doesn’t speak Arabic

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I wanted to highlight a great catch made by commenter Ben to my earlier post on United’s in-flight navigation system, shown here:

united_gateway

If you look closely at the lower right corner of the screen, the Arabic link is not correctly displayed. I certainly wasn’t looking that closely, but Ben was.

As he noted, the characters are correct, but they’re not joined properly.

Below is what the word should look like and, below it, the characters displayed individually:

arabic

Arabic  characters exhibit different forms based on their position within a word. There are four forms, described here.

In the case of United’s in-flight entertainment screen, this is is a big mistake. How did it occur?

Clearly, a proofreader could have helped United avoid this situation altogether.

Technically speaking, it could be that the entertainment system does not support Unicode, which is the best way to go about supporting not only Arabic, but most of the world’s languages. However, the Asian fonts appear to be correctly displayed, which leads me to believe that this is not a technical issue but simply a matter of the Arabic word losing its joining properties at some point during the production process — and nobody ever noticing, until now.

Thanks Ben for the heads up!

To learn more, check out my new book The Art of the Global Gateway.

iGoogle: Now in 42 Languages

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The customized Google home page known as iGoogle has been localized into a bunch of additional languages, bringing the grand total to 42. Here are the most recently added languages:

- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalian
- Croatian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Tagalog

Since languages span borders, the total number of country domains now supported by iGoogle number more than 70.

According to the Google Blog, “with this launch, more than 99% of Internet users can take advantage of these features in their native language.”

Based on my research, your Web site needs to support 10 languages to reach more than 80% of the world’s Internet users. To get to 99%, you definitely have to exceed 30 to 35 languages (depending on the mix), which very few companies have done. In the 2007 Web Globalization Report Card, out of the 200 Web sites reviewed, only 28 sites exceeded 30 languages and only 3 sites exceeded 40 languages.

The languages that Google has recently added reflects a larger Web globalization trend. Large multinationals that already support the core Western European and Asian languages are now turning their attention to Eastern and Northern Europe and the Middle East.

While a Slovakian Web site may be off the radar for most global marketing executives, it may not be off their radar for very long.

The Localization of iPhone

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So I gave in to my inner geek and purchased an iPhone.

One of the things I first noticed (and love) about the Web browser is the .com button on the keypad, shown here.

iPhone keypad

Of course, this little shortcut isn’t so handy if I want to visit a .org or .edu Web site.

It’s also not much use for visiting country-specific Web sites, such as www.yahoo.fr.

Which is why the localization of this interface is going to be an interesting thing to watch evolve.

It is just a matter of time before we see the iPhone launched around the world. So does that mean the .com key will be replaced by .de or .fr keys? I imagine so.

This will give companies yet another good reason to register country code domains. While a Web user in France may first go to acme.com and then navigate to acme.fr when visiting a Web site. Using the iPhone, it’s likely that person will simply go to acme.fr, an example of a new interface changing user behavior.

The other interesting thing I’ve noticed on the iPhone so far is that it doesn’t appear to be using a “conventional” Unicode font. That is, I’m finding that the interface displays Chinese and other Asian scripts just fine — as well as Cyrillic — but it can’t display Arabic or Hebrew scripts. What this says to me is that Apple doesn’t have the Middle East on its near-term global expansion plans. My guess is that it’s using the scaled-down font to conserve drive space. Documentation is hard to come by so far so I’d love to hear from anyone out there who knows more about this.

I’ve been to Europe once so far and the iPhone held up quite nicely; AT&T didn’t hit me up for too much in roaming fees. It is interesting — though not surprising — that you can’t de-activate cellular roaming and just rely on Wi-Fi. I did have a faulty power adapter but got that replaced at the Apple store with no resistance.

But back to the Web browser. I know this has been said many times before, but this is the first phone that makes browsing the Web about as easy as it is on a computer. And I suspect that over time this will have an impact not only on how companies develop Web sites in the US, but how they localize these sites for markets around the world.