Category Archives: Events

Free webinar: Secrets of the Best Global Websites

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I’m pleased to be speaking on a topic near and dear to my heart — the best practices of global websites.

Lionbridge is hosting the webinar and attendance is free.

The date and time is May 20th at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

You can register online here.

And here is what you’ll get out of the call (if I do my job well):

In this comprehensive one-hour webcast, John will draw on findings from his 2010 Web Globalization Report Card and provide insights on the best global web sites, highlighting language trends, navigation tips and emerging trends. Websites profiled include Facebook, Apple, Starbucks, and more.

By attending this webinar, you will learn:

  • The hottest languages on the web today
  • Why Facebook was able to go from two to 70 languages in only two years
  • How companies such as Apple and Google benefit from global design consistency
  • How global communities can improve your localization efforts

And bring lots of questions! I hope you to see (hear) you there.

Google Adwords unavailable (in 17 languages)

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

Google Adwords in 17 languages

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.