Global by Design

Someone is promoting the sale of a Chinese domain name, shown here. Technically, this domain is represented over the Internet as http://www.xn--45q.ws, which is the ASCII equivalent of the Chinese character — the DNS is still ASCII-only.
In China, the number 8 one of the best numbers to have on [...]

[Read more →]

File this post under Lost in (Machine) Translation.

This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial.
Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an English-language sign using machine translation (MT) software and, apparently, the MT engine wasn’t working all that well.
So instead of “restaurant” we have “translate server error.”
It’s certainly one [...]

[Read more →]

It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world.
As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global.
Om Malik recently reported some key stats from [...]

[Read more →]

Professor Nitish Singh, author of The Culturally Customized Web Site, has just launched a certificate program in Web globalization management through St. Louis University.
You can learn more at www.globalizationexecutive.com.
Subscribe to the Global by Design RSS feed

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]