Global by Design

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 years. (Personally, I think [...]

[Read more →]

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 offering TEDTalks with [...]

[Read more →]

So who’s applied for IDNs so far?
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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Nearly one year ago, I asked Will .CN become the next .COM?
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 [...]

[Read more →]