Global by Design

I recently finished reading Redefining Global Strategies: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter by Pankaj Ghemawat.

This book provides a strong counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat.
While The World is Flat may leave an executive thinking We have to be in Brazil and Russia and China and India yesterday! Pankaj emphasizes [...]

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Earlier this year I developed the Map of the World Wide Web, shown here:

This map was designed to fit on a cubicle wall and include the major country code top level domains (ccTLDs) that a global Webmaster may encounter.
And although the map includes a whopping 180 ccTLDs, that is not all of them. To include [...]

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SDL today released its “World Language League Table” which lists the languages that SDL has been most frequently translating.
The company says it translates more than a billion words each year into more than 150 languages.
Here are then 10 most-popular languages this year:
1. Canadian French
2. Spanish
3. French
4. German
5. Italian
6. Chinese
7. Japanese
8. Dutch
9. English
10. Russian
�We have observed [...]

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When you work in this industry for awhile, you get pretty familiar with country codes such as .de for Germany or .cn for China. But there are simply too many country codes to memorize them all.
Which is what drove me to develop the Map of the World Wide Web.
This map aligns country codes over their [...]

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The March/April issue of Global by Design is now out and features key tips on Web localization for Brazil. Brazil is the target of a growing number of multinationals; this article focuses on some of the key issues marketing and Web execs must be aware of before going local.

The article is excerpted from our new [...]

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Guest Article:
By John Greenwood
InterPro Translation Solutions
There are choices you must consider when translating for some countries with multiple languages and into some languages that are used in multiple countries.
English is English, Spanish is Spanish, Portuguese is Portuguese, Belgian is Belgian, Swiss is Swiss and Chinese is Chinese — true? Well not quite. For starters, two [...]

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Jupiter Research and Akamai have published a free report that reminds retailers that a fast-loading Web site still matters.
Says the Tekrati article, “Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site.”
A slow-loading site is second only to high [...]

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Google has added Google News Web sites for Brazil and Portugal. This brings the total of language and country specific News sites to 23, assuming I counted correctly…

Today Google also announced the opening of offices in Mexico and Brazil, part of its ongoing effort to expand its presence in Latin America.

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Emerging markets are driving the Web globalization revolution.
Investment bankers use an acronym that is going to have a major impact on the future of the globalization industry: BRIC.
BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the four countries that pose the greatest opportunities for long-term growth among emerging markets. Of course, the key words [...]

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The Reveries Web site has an interesting piece on Whirlpool and its localization efforts in Latin America. Apparently the company has had great success in Brazil by creating a low-cost “people’s washer” with features unique to the marketplace.
Here’s an excerpt:
Whirlpool’s research also revealed that aesthetics were important because washers are considered status symbols. In China, [...]

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