In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization.

Oddly missing from that list was China’s IDN.

One of the reasons ICANN initiated a fast-track process — if not the reason — was China.

China began putting pressure on ICANN a few years back by registering second-level IDNs and hinting that it would offer full-length IDNs if ICANN didn’t get moving. China’s Internet is essentially an intranet after all, so there is no reason the country couldn’t resolve full-length IDNs next week if it wanted.

Perhaps China’s IDN has already been approved ICANN has simply not gotten around to announcing it.

Still, I find the silence curious. Which is why I was interested to read that the president of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, traveled to China recently.

This article posits that China’s IDN application was one of the issues behind his trip.

What do you think? Is China’s IDN being used as leverage by ICANN?

Here they are:

• Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
• Egypt (EG): مصر
• United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
• Russian Federation (RU): рф

I’m surprised to see China absent from this list. But there are 12 other requests behind these four.

I know it’s way too early to start predicting the rise of the Arabic-language Internet, but it’s exciting to see such interest in the Middle East.

Here’s the ICANN press release.

Long before Google launched Google.cn, it launched the Chinese localized version of Google.com.

And this site is alive and well and hosted outside of China’s great firewall.

Just change your browser’s language preference to Chinese and you’ll see it the next time you visit Google.

And had China not continually blocked this site from Chinese citizens years ago, perhaps Google would not have compromised so to enter the market.

But it did. Its services got blocked anyway. And Baidu is still number one.

Here’s a good article that posits that Google’s Korea strategy is what led to what is happening right now with China.

If you want to know the world’s most dangersous ccTLDs, ask an anti-virus software company.

McAfee has released its list of most dangerous country codes. Here are the top five:

1. Cameroon (.cm)
2. PR of China (.cn)
3. Samoa (.ws)
4. Philippines (.ph)
5. Former Soviet Union (.su)

Why is Camerooon at the top of the list?

Because .cm is a common typo by users who intended to type .com.

According to McAfee, more than 30% of all domains registered under .cm are up to no good.

I have a business idea for Verisign — why not license .cm and bundle it with .com registrations to give users a more secure domain package. I could see many companies paying for this.

China is number two. The country has made efforts recently to clean up its domain by requiring business licenses of its registrants. Some of the Western media have misinterpreted this as censorship. That’s one of the great ironies of managing top-level domains. You kinda have to keep a close eye on what the registrants are doing with these domains if you want to ensure a safer Internet.

But I digress.

And what are the safest ccTLDs? Here are the top five:

1. Japan (.jp)
2. Ireland (.ie)
3. Croatia (.hr)
4. Luxembourg (.lu)
5. Vanuatu (.vu)

You can view a larger map here.

Here it is in Spanish…

And Chinese…

And, my favorite, “pirate English”…

Thanks largely to volunteer translators, Facebook has localized from one to 70 languages in two years. (Personally, I think we need more of the goofy ones — I’d so much rather “Adjust me riggins” than “Change settings” or change the “Settins o’ me piracy” than my “Privacy Settings.” I’m thinking of volunteering to do “Snarky English” myself.)

If you’re a translator, there’s a link on Facebook (on the language setting page) where you can find out more. And if you’re interested in more where this came from, check out our new report, coming in 2010.

And TED, which has been using the crowd to provide translation of its videos, is looking for a few more participants. Here’s a recent blog posting:

Wanted: Translators
The goal of TED’s Open Translation Project is to bring ideas worth spreading to the wider world by offering TEDTalks with subtitles in as many languages as possible. Still, many of the world’s languages aren’t yet represented in the project, and we want to fill those gaps. Today, we’re putting out a call to translators worldwide to help us translate the languages that the project hasn’t yet covered.

We’re looking for translators who speak these languages, in particular:

• Akan
• Assamese
• Filipino
• Galician
• Gujarati
• Icelandic
• Khmer
• Maltese
• Marathi
• Mongolian
• Nepali
• Panjabi
• Sinhala
• Tagalog
• Tibetan
• Tswana
• Yoruba
• Zulu

In some cases, translations in the languages above have already been completed, but remain unpublished because they still need to be reviewed. (Some of the languages only have one translator.)

These languages aren’t exactly what the translation industry would call Tier 1. That is, there simply isn’t as deep pool of translators to draw from. Which is why any crowdsourcing strategy must take into account the size of the potential crowd.

So how is TED doing so far with its crowdsourcing project?

This menu should give you an idea of what languages are covered and to what extent. Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese are doing best by far.

For roughly six months of work, TED appears to be doing quite well.

According to ICANN, 10 applications (representing five languages) were submitted over the first four days.

ICANN won’t announce exactly who applied and for what until each application is successful — which pushes us well into 2010.

So I’ve had to turn to press reports from the registries to piece together the data.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Egypt (Was the first country to apply)
• Saudi Arabia
• UAE
• Russia
• China
• Bulgaria
• Israel

Unless a country made more than one application (which I don’t believe is allowed under fast track protocol) I’m still missing three countries. I’m guessing there could be one or more additional Middle East countries. And perhaps Taiwan.

What do you think? What countries/languages am I missing?

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.

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

Russia will likely be using this IDN next year:

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.

And perhaps I was right in more ways than one.

Because now it appears that .CN is experiencing its very own .COM bust.

Just a year ago Chinese domain registrations were booming, so quickly in fact that .CN had surpassed .DE to become the most-registered ccTLD.

Of course, registrations were cheap, really cheap.

A year later, those domains have come up for renewal. And, according to Domain Pulse, more than a million of those domains have not been renewed:

Registrations for .CN have declined from an end-of-month peak of 14,082,553 in February 2009 to 12,545,589, a decline of approximately 1.5 million

Which means Germany (.DE), at just under 13 million registrations, has regained the top spot as the number one ccTLD.

Even with ccTLDs, there are peaks and troughs, as illustrated here:

I’m still confident that .CN will reign supreme (perhaps until .IN gives it some competition).

But first it must recover from this little bubble.

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 your license plate, phone number, etc — because of the way it’s pronounced. But this particular domain is attached to the .WS ccTLD, which is Western Samoa. As ccTLDs go, .WS is not exactly up there with .COM or .CN. So maybe that’s why the owner is promoting it so heavily — I came across this sale via a press release.

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 of the more memorable restaurant names I’ve come across. I’ll be sure to look out for it when I visit!

And I’ve love to know which MT engine delivered this message.

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 Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.

You can learn more at www.globalizationexecutive.com.

But there is a different type of gateway out there that is worth mentioning — a gateway unique to the Web sites of alcoholic beverages: the age gateway.

Here is the age gateway of Budweiser:

The age gateway has to be one of the most useless gateways ever devised — and certainly one of the most frustrating to use.

For starters, every beer maker seems to have its own take on how best to design the gateway. The gateways are usually Flash-based and typically difficult to use. What I end up doing is simply entering 01/01/1971 just to get through it as quickly as possible.

I would predict that the logs of Budweiser feature an inordinately high number of people born on the first day of the year.

But the reason why I’m mentioning the age gateway here is two-fold. In the case of Budweiser (and most competitive Web sites), the age gateway comes before the global gateway.

Once you get past the “virtual bouncer” and into the Budweiser site, in order to find your specific country or language Web site, you must do a bit of searching. Here is the buried link:

This link takes you to this page:

According to Budweiser, “great taste knows no boundaries.” But great global design apparently does run up against a few boundaries. For a non-English speaker, getting to this gateway is no trivial task.

What’s the lesson here?

Don’t place the age gateway before the global gateway.

Let the Web user find his or her localized Web site before you present your virtual bouncer. This is particularly important because dates are not presented in the same format in all countries. By directing the user to his or her local site first, you can then present your age gateway in the correct date format.

And, as my brother pointed out, different countries have different drinking ages — yet another reason to put the global gateway before the age gateway.

Now for the second point I wanted to make regarding age gateways.

Not long ago I came across a new product known as the Beertender. It’s a sort of mini-keg fridge designed specifically for Heineken.

Take a moment to visit www.beertender.com and you’ll first encounter this splash global gateway:

It is not until you select a country that you arrive at an age gateway.To my knowledge, Heineken is the first company to place its global gateway ahead of the age gateway!

If you select the French site, you’ll arrive at a very simple yes/no age gateway:

But because American lawyers are not as freewheeling as the French in regards to underage drinking, here is the American age gateway:

But even here you’ll find that Beertender makes significant usability improvements. Instead of asking the user to input dates, you simply select the dates displayed on the screen. It’s remarkably faster to get through.

So it’s nice to see Beertender not only put its global gateway ahead of its age gateway, but also support localized and user-friendly age gateways. I hope the other beer makers of the world take notice.

Here’s a screen grab of the figures I want to focus on:

What makes this chart so interesting are the growth rates — .com is growing at 5% and .cn is growing at 18%. Granted, it’s easier to grow at 18% when you’ve only got 12 million registrations, compared with growing at 5% when you’ve got 76 million registrations.

But growth is growth and .cn is clearly on a roll.

And China has a lot of headroom for growth in terms of Web users and potential domain registrants. I am confident that .cn will reach 50 million registrations over the next 3 years.

At about that point in time, .com should be around 100 million registrants — in no danger of losing its number one status.

However, if the rate of growth of .com registrations were to decrease while .cn rate of growth continues to increase, it’s reasonable to wonder if we will one day see the number of .cn registrations surpass .com registrations?

I realize this is a far-fetched scenario.

After all, it’s reasonable to assume that companies that register .cn may also register .com — and the majority do just that.

But it’s certainly something to contemplate. And even if .cn never comes close to surpassing .com, the overall point I’d like to emphasize here is that .cn is now the world’s second most popular domain extention — and likely to remain that way for many years.

What do you think?

Here are before and after shots of the language gateway.

August 6th:

August 14th:

What I find interesting is that these two languages were either added right when the Olympics began or possibly even a few days later.

United States

220 million Internet users

70% penetration

China

253 million Internet users

19% penetration

For readers of this blog, this development is hardly news. But it’s significant nonetheless. After all, the US isn’t exactly going to catch back up in this regard. China wins the numbers game, at least when it comes to people.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from the article:

Baidu, for instance, said on Thursday that its second-quarter net profit had jumped 81 percent. During that period, Baidu had a 63 percent share of China’s search engine market, while Google had about 26 percent, with Yahoo trailing far behind, according to iResearch, a market research firm based in Beijing.

Tencent, a popular site for social networking and gaming, now has a stock market value of $15 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies. In comparison, Amazon.com is valued at about $30 billion.

China also leads in having the world’s most popular country code (.cn).

Being the globalization geek that I am, I couldn’t help but check out the home page of Yahoo! Spain, which features a localized header, shown here:

And then I noticed that the home page of Yahoo! Germany was also localized for the home team.

So who the heck was Yahoo! rooting for?

Everyone, it seems.

Which highlights a delicate issue for multinational Web sites — that of not appearing to root for one country over another. The golden rule of course is to simply treat each country equally. This is easy to do when it comes to localizing headers, but not so easy when it comes to providing equal levels of customer support, product documentation, and so on.

Yahoo! is not alone in navigating these waters. Here is Google Germany:

Interestingly, you can’t view this German page by simply entering google.de. You need to use a German-based IP proxy.

And now here’s my second Web globalization thought: Why does the Euro 2008 Web site support vastly more languages than the Beijing Olympics Web site?

Here is the Euro site, with support for 9 languages.

And here is the Olympics site, with support for just English, French, and Chinese.

I find it ironic that an event that is billed as a global event supports fewer languages than an event that has Euro in its title. Euro 2008 even supports Japanese, Chinese, and Korean even though these countries don’t have participating teams.

I realize that the Olympic Charter specifies just two official languages: English and French. And the host country generally adds its local language to the mix as well. This rule makes sense for signage, announcements, etc. But I don’t see why the Web site should support only three languages.

The argument can be made by the Olympics that they simply cannot justify financially supporting every language of every participating country. But I still don’t buy it. If Euro2008 can support 9 languages, the Olympics can and should do better than three.

IDNs are “internationalized domain names” — which basically means domains that use non-Latin characters. The Internet wasn’t exactly designed to support IDNs, particularly in URLs, but this is about to change in a big way.

China has historically been the most vocal advocate for IDNs, but now Russia is making noise as well. ICANN is in the process of testing IDNs right now and has stated that it wants to have a formal process in place for supporting them by the end of this year.

IDNs are the last major step toward creating a truly user-friendly Internet for people who don’t speak English and don’t use Latin characters — which is quite a few people on this planet. I would not be surprised to see both China and Russia not only embrace IDNs but require foreign companies to register them if they wish to do business in their countries.

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 languages on this page — from Chinese to German to Japanese.

Google generally does a very good job of “guessing” the Web user’s language through a combination of geolocation and browser language detection — and then providing users with their matching language. But in this case Google simply slapped up a “one-size-fits-most” Web page — which is a lot of visual noise.

And even with 17 languages, the page comes up a bit short in serving all Adwords users — as Google Adwords supports more than 35 languages.

What’s the lesson here? That when it comes to Web globalization, no detail is too small — including those details such as error strings, 404 pages, and “temporarily unavailable” pages.

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 fortune.”
8 means “abundance of wealth” or “make lots of money.”

The number 8 is a very lucky number, and the reason why China chose August 8th, 2008 to kick off Olympics Games. Vehicle license plates and cellphone numbers containing 6 or 8 are coveted and often auctioned to the highest bidder. A recent example: A C88888 vehicle license was auctioned in Guangdong where it sold for RMB800,000 (around USD113,000). The new owner hopes this license number helps bring good fortune — though presumably the owner was already fortunate enough to have the money to spend on the license plate.

9 means “forever.”

If a boy wants to buy a rose for his girlfriend, he will typically buy 9 roses. If he wants to splurge, he’ll buy 19 roses — and if he’s affluent, he’ll buy 99 roses. September 9th is Senior People Day in China, to ensure that th elderly live a healthy and long life.

4 is pronounced the same as “dead.”
13 means crazy, abnormal.

If a Chinese person says “you are 13″, it means “you are insane!” Some buildings, like in the US, avoid having a 13th floor. Instead, they use floor 12B. And although the pronunciation of 4 sounds like “dead,” there is a positive way to portray the number: In a musical scale, 4 is equialent to “fa,” which is pronounced closely to “make money” in Chinese. My old phone number contains “5854″ and my Chinese friends say it is a great number because it means “I make money and then I make money again.” I am happy to hear their comments.

51 in Chinese is pronounces like “I (5) wanna (1).”

You’ll find a lot of businesses and Websites using 51 in their names. 51job is the largest online human resources company. So you can tell a lot about a company simply by the numbers it uses in its domain name. Since 1 sounds like “wanna,” the number 18 is also popular as “wanna make money” and many people will choose the 18th of the month as a new business opening date or a wedding date.

Even numbers > odd numbers

Chinese people like to use even numbers rather than odd numbers because even number are related to the concept of “pairs” which usually means “perfect” in Chinese culture.

With regards to business, if a company produces different versions of products, expect them to produce 6, 8, or 12, 36 different versions. And you can always find prices like 88.00, 128.00; 156.00 in China’s shopping malls.

McDonald’s

Cisco

Intel

Oracle

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, black is a more effective way of expressing grief on the white background of a Web page.

Google China and Baidu have turned their logos black as well.

It’s just a shame more of the world won’t see these sites — as I found them quite moving. Everything about China seems to be beyond comprehension, including, unfortunately, this earthquake.

The topic is global navigation — why it’s so important and how to improve upon it. I wrote an ebook about this topic two years ago. Since then, geolocation and language negotiation have become more commonly used and an increasing number of companies have launched splash global gateways — like Intel, which launched its first splash gateway just last week.

If I have time, I also plan to talk about IDNs — internationalized domain names — and why companies will need to register them (and may in fact be required to register them).

See you on June 3rd!

In this article, I do just that, and I render a verdict as to which Web site is better.

Search

The best way to compare search engine quality is to compare searches.

I recently input three Chinese keywords for my experiment:

• 许霆 (Xu Ting: A Chinese citizen who was recently involved in a controversial criminal case)
• 次级房贷 (Subprime mortgage)
• 看羹吃饭 (Kan-Geng-Chi-fan: A phrase used and recognized by a relatively small number of Chinese, meaning that you have to think carefully before taking action)

These keywords represent three different categories of information people search for online. Xu Ting is a hot keyword in China at the moment but it has received little international media coverage. Subprime mortgage, on the other hand, is a foreign concept and the term has been transliterated into Chinese characters from the English equivalent. Kan-Geng-Chi-fan is used within a specific dialect that is not used by the majority of Chinese citizens.

Okay, here are the results as of April 18, 2008:

“Xu Ting”

• Baidu: 2,000,000 results
• Google.com: 1,440,000 results
• Google.cn: 1,330,000 results

It would seem that Baidu knows much more about Xu Ting than Google, although I did not verify that every result referred to this particular individual.

Interestingly, in the first results page of both google.com and google.cn, one of the search results directed users to Baidu Post — Baidu’s popular user forum.

Overall, I would rate both sites equally because the top 20 results from each search engine were highly qualified and I could easily find information I wanted from there. Verdict: A tie.

“Subprime mortgage”

• Baidu: 1,050,000 results
• Google.com: 387,000 results
• Google.cn: 1,540,000 results

This time google.cn appears to do much better than Baidu. But if we look closely at the top 20 search results, we’ll find there are 7 results at google.com and 5 results at google.cn that direct us to Web sites that use traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and by the overseas Chinese community.

It can be rather challenging for the mainland Chinese to read traditional Chinese, though they can understand most of the message. Nonetheless, this mix of simplified and traditional Characters is not the most user-friendly approach. Verdict: Baidu wins.

“Kan Geng Chi Fan”

• Baidu.com 207 results
• Google.com 4,000,000 results
• Google.cn 247,000 results

At first glance, Google produced overwhelmingly more information than Baidu. However, if we examine the details, Google did not perform so well. Neither Google.com nor Google.cn produce an accurate search result within the first 10 pages respectively, while all the 207 search results from Baidu are accurate. Verdict: Baidu wins again.

Based on these three searches, Google comes across as a bit complicated and “foreign” to Chinese users. Baidu is the superior Chinese search engine.

Products

Both Google and Baidu are trying to leverage their network effects to promote other products. Google has many excellent products, but not every product has performed well in China. For example, Google Maps is widely used by American users. Unfortunately, Google Maps in China is unable to provide the same features due to unavailability of mapping data in China. Google’s satellite map currently only covers the major Chinese cities. Should Google acquire better maps, it would have a clear advantage over Baidu, which doesn’t offer the same degree of functionality and usability in its map tool.

Although music copyright is a controversial issue within China, the market reality is that millions of Chinese Internet users download free music online. Baidu understands this reality and its music search product — which presents a list of links for free music downloads when people search by song, singer, or label — is extremely popular. Google is unable to compete with Baidu in this regard due to its adherence to US copyright laws.

Another example is Baidu Post, an online forum allowing Internet user to create new topics based on search keywords and provide commentary. When people search online by keyword, they can also follow these keywords to Baidu Post, where they may find additional information — or at least find out what others think of the selected keywords.

Online forums are a very important medium in China for distributing information online. I think an important reason for this is because the Chinese, as well as many businesses, want to remain anonymous. While this may change in the years ahead as the next generation embraces social networking sites, for the time being, online forums are dominant. Baidu also offers a blog platform (Hi Baidu) while Google has localized Blogger into Chinese, very few Chinese people currently use it.

Local culture and consumer behavior are critical factors in determining whether a product will succeed in an overseas market or not. So far, Google products have not been as appealing as Baidu to Chinese users.

The Brand Name

The name of Baidu (百度) is from a beautiful Chinese ancient poem:

Thousands of times, I looked for my girl;

Suddenly, at some point, I stopped and looked back,

I found she was just over there among a bunch of lanterns.

This poem, written by Qiji Xin, who lived in the Song Dynasty nearly 1000 years ago, is still very popular in China and also taught in high schools. Baidu in Chinese means thousands of times. In Chinese culture, this poem communicates one’s desire to achieve his/her dreams. Obviously, meshes well with the services offered by Baidu, a company that claims it better understands Chinese users and Chinese culture.

Google started to use its Chinese name Guge (谷歌) in 2006. Guge (goo-ge) is transliterated from Google and it literally means “the song of grain” in Chinese. A survey conducted in 2006 shows 84.6% Chinese do not like this name. I think the most important reason is that Chinese people want to feel international and modern. This is also one reason you may see many Chinese companies using English words in their marketing materials, as it creates an international effect. The “song of grain” presents an image of the agricultural society that the Chinese people are striving to break away from.

Google has exerted a good deal of effort in localizing its name for China but it has not yet been accepted by the Chinese people. It may take some time. Some companies have chosen to simply use their English names in China, avoiding localization altogether, such as IBM.

To sum up, Baidu definitely has an edge over Google in China. But it is early yet and Google has been doing things such as redesigning its Chinese home page, which may resonate with users. The key takeaway here is that every new market is a new challenge; just because you are number one at home does not mean you will be number one in every country you enter. Should Baidu enter the US market some day, it will face many of the same challenges that Google is now facing in China.

Here’s a visual I cranked out that illustrates eBay’s transformation over the years:

Like Google, eBay has foreign exchange rates to thank for the strong quarter, that is, a pathetically weak US dollar. Then again, eBay wouldn’t have been able to benefit from a weak dollar if it wasn’t already a global player to begin with. It’s worth emphasizing that those companies that were well diversified globally (as in Web globalization) before the dollar’s slide are navigating this looming recession quite nicely.

But I think the more interesting point is that eBay has continued to grow revenues internationally despites its numerous missteps in China. This should be a lesson to other companies that are thinking of throwing all their eggs into China. China has actually been a drag on eBay, while Western Europe has been a blessing.

By the way, eBay’s newest market launch was in Thailand.

Four years ago, I was working for a localization company in Shanghai. One day, I received a phone call from a woman who said: “I read your advertisement about localization services. We’ve just moved to Shanghai and I was wondering if you could help find a baby-sitter for us.” This may sound like a strange request, but it was not that unusual back then.

Fortunately, times have changed, and quickly. China has become one of the most important regional markets in the world for multinational corporations:

• 470 of the Fortune 500 companies have invested in China;
• 750+ multinational companies, including Microsoft, Intel, GE, and Motorola have established R&D centers in China;
• In 2006, 144 multinational companies chose Shanghai as their Asia-Pacific regional headquarters, while 36 chose Beijing. These numbers are certain to grow.

And then there are the 210 million Internet users in China, according to CNNIC, making the country an alluring market for any Web-based service or application.

However, Chinese Web users have proven to be very selective when choosing news, ecommerce, and networking products. More often than not, they are choosing home-grown products. For example:

• Despite Google’s best efforts thus far, Baidu is still the number one search engine in China.
• Sina, Sohu, and Netease remain the three biggest news portals in this market, and not Yahoo! China.
• QQ is an IM tool developed by Tencent, a local company. It now has 160 million registered users and 50 million active users, greatly outnumbering the users of Yahoo Massager, MSN, and Google Talk.
• Although MySpace has been successful in the States, it seems that Chinese people are more interested in local social networking sites, such as Mop and Tianya.

These few examples demonstrate the significant challenges that companies face when localizing for China. There are cultural, financial, and lingustic obstacle to overcome — many of which I plan to address in more detail in future articles.

Germany currently leads with roughly 11.5 million .de registrations, but China recently surpassed the 10 million mark, and is adding 20,000 registrations per day.

Keep in mind, this 10 million statistic includes all permutations of .cn, such as gov.cn and edu.cn. The .cn domain registered by companies inside and outside of China, such as Intel.cn and Google.cn, accounts for 6 million of the 10 million registrations.

It’s no surprise that China would surpass Germany. What is surprising is China’s rate of growth, as visualized here:

Google today unveiled a “Year of the Rat” logo on its home page:

And, wouldn’t you know it, so did Baidu:

Interesting times.

PS: Here is Yahoo! China…

CNNIC says that China now has 210 million Web users, an increase of more than 73 million over the past year. These are staggering growth figures and it’s safe to project that China will overtake the US, which is hovering around 215 million Web users, sometime late next month.

When it does, I’m sure the CNNIC will be the first to announce it.

Now the race is on for companies to localize their Web sites for these 210 million Web users, like Starwood, which is ahead of many of its competitors.

What more can you say? When it comes to potential Web users, China has a lot more headroom than the US. What we’re seeing transpire was inevitable, though the timing is much faster than many of us (me included) would have predicted.

And India could one day surpass China’s numbers.

PS: I visited the CNNIC Web site to read the press release, but they hadn’t translated any English-language content since last year. So I went to the source, the Chinese-language site, and used Google Translate to read their press release. Check it out for yourself — and I must say that the quality of Google’s machine translations since it started using its own statistical machine translation software has improved considerably.

Here are the top six country codes based on registrations:

1. Germany: 11,120,000
2. China: 6,035,000
3. United Kingdom: 6,010,000
4. Netherlands: 2,545,000
5. Italy: 1,426,000
6. United States: 1,300,000

According to my calculations, France would be ranked either 10th or 11th overall, depending on where Switzerland and Australia stand currently. These numbers are changing very quickly, with China on a fast pace to take over the number one spot and Russia and India making good progress as well.For more information on country codes (specifically ccTLDs) check out our new Country Codes of the World map.

Starwood Hotels has announced that it has launched Chinese-language Web sites for all of its hotel brands — from Westin to Sheraton to St. Regis.

The hotel chain had previously offered varying levels of Chinese support across its hotel brands but has definitely made a big step forward. The room-booking engine is in Chinese as are customer support tools.

China is Starwood’s fastest-growing market and only getting bigger. The company manages 40 hotels in China with an additional 40 under development. According to their press release, “In 2006, the market size for hotel bookings in China reached US$121 million and around 40% of this revenue was contributed by five-star hotels. By 2010, the market size for hotel online booking will hit US$347 million.”

Starwood was ranked the best global hotel Web site in our 2007 Web Globalization Report Card and thanks to efforts such as this appears poised to do well in the 2008 report.

Motoko Hunt over at Multilingual Search writes about Baidu, China’s leading search portal, and its official entry into Japan

As I mentioned in last month, Baidu has long had its sights set on entering the Japanese market. The launch date is January 23rd (though the site is now live at www.baidu.jp). It appears that additional search features will be launched on the 23rd, such as for travel and restaurants.

According to Motoko, the quality of Baidu’s engine will be rough initially, because some Japanese sites have been avoiding Baidu’s spiders.

And then there’s the issue of content filtering/censorship. It’s one thing for a US-based search engine to be fully open in the US and censored in China (i.e., Google) and another thing for a Chinese-based search engine to be censored at home and fully open abroad. I’m not quite sure this is even possible, but we shall see.

Yahoo! dominates Japan currently.

So here are the top 10 posts of 2007 based on traffic:

1. The Best Global Web Sites of 2007
2. Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing This quote from the Starbucks CEO speaks volumes about the company’s success around the world.
3. Which Country; Which Language? A guest article by John Greenwood of InterPro Translation Services continues to be very popular.
4. The Best Global Web Sites (and why) This entry is a nice summary of some of the best practices exhibited by the top sites in the 2007 Report Card.
5. Register.Me Montenegro is getting its own country code (.me) and one can imagine the entertaining possibilities this domain presents for creative URLs.
6. Staples: Asi de Facil Hardly a week goes by that I don’t press my “That was easy” button, translated in Spanish. They sell a lot of these here in San Diego. I’m still waiting for the Chinese version.
7. If The World Were 100 People This is a personal favorite.
8. Scaling a Great Wall: Top 5 Tips for Learning Chinese This is another guest article, by Saul Gitlin of Kang & Lee, and a very hot topic these days.
9. Just Don’t Do It: The Art of Slogan Translation
10. The Localization of iPhone

So there you have it — the top 10 entries out of the 99 entries posted in 2007. Yes, I know I’m not the most active blogger as bloggers go. But I only blog when the urge strikes and sometimes it just does not strike. Which is probably a good thing.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

And on that note I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year!