Global by Design

Adventures in Web Globalization

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Entries Tagged as 'China'

Two thoughts on Euro 2008 and Web globalization

June 29th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Congratulations to Spain for emerging on top of Euro 2008. I can’t say that I was pulling for any one team, but I would have loved to have seen Germany score a last-second goal to keep the tournament alive.
Being the globalization geek that I am, I couldn’t help but check out the home page of [...]

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Tags: China · Google · Languages · Translation · Web Globalization

IDNs become a presidential issue

June 16th, 2008 · No Comments

Nick Wilsdon at Multilingual Search quotes a Russian news story in which Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev says “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is a pretty serious thing. It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language [...]

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Tags: China · Domain names · Russia

Google Adwords unavailable (in 17 languages)

June 8th, 2008 · No Comments

I tried to login to Google Adwords recently and was met with the following “temporarily unavailable” Web page:

The page illustrates one of the many the challenges of managing a Web site that supports so many languages. Even something supposedly as simple as this temporary page is not quite so simple. There are a whopping 17 [...]

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Tags: China · Events · Google · Software Localization · US Hispanic Market · Web Globalization

Translating numbers in China

June 1st, 2008 · No Comments

As John wrote awhile back: All lucky numbers are local.
And this is particularly true in China, where people pay thousands of dollars to obtain license plates with lucky numbers.
So when it comes to naming products or setting prices, you have to be very careful about your choice of numbers. Here are some tips:
6 means “good [...]

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Tags: Business globalization · China · Culture · Translation

Web sites go black in China (cont.)

May 21st, 2008 · 1 Comment

Here are some more localized Chinese Web sites that have gone black:
McDonald’s

Cisco

Intel

Oracle

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Tags: China · Web Globalization

Web sites go black in China

May 21st, 2008 · 5 Comments

If you visit the .com pages of Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and Amazon, you’ll see the usual bursts of color and promotional elements — that is, business as usual.
But if you visit the Chinese home pages of these five companies, you’re going to see the following:

Although white more commonly signifies death and mourning in China, [...]

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Tags: Apple · China · Google · Web Globalization