Global by Design

ICANN shed some light on its fast-track application process today, announcing the first four countries to pass the string evaluation of the process. 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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: Cameroon (.cm) PR of China (.cn) Samoa (.ws) Philippines (.ph) Former Soviet Union (.su) Why is Camerooon at the top of the list? Because .cm [...]

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I’m working on the Web Globalization Report Card, and this, plus my fascination with Facebook, inspired me to check out my Forgetting English page in several different languages. 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 [...]

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For translation crowdsourcing to work, first you need crowds. 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 [...]

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