Category Archives: China

Google may leave China, but don’t expect it to leave Chinese

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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 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.

The world’s most dangerous country codes

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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:

  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.

Forgetting English (literally)

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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 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.

TED is looking for a few good translators

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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 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.

ted_languages_content

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