Global by Design

Two weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Babelfish — by relying on translator reviews.
Ethan has provided me with a mid-point summary of results, which I’ve included below. I was surprised to find that Microsoft and Babelfish are [...]

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I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.
Here are the top 25 web sites overall:

Google

Facebook

Cisco Systems

Philips

Samsung

Wikipedia

3M

NIVEA

Symantec

Lenovo

Xbox

Autodesk

Gmail

Microsoft

Nokia

Intel

Caterpillar

Panasonic

HP

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu

LG

Volvo Group

Hotels.com

SAP

Kodak

Google has emerged on top again, but just barely.
The big story this year is that Facebook and Google finished in a numerical tie. But because Google supports more languages (for now), it [...]

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Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but usually only when I want to compare engines. I haven’t used Babel Fish in years.
But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, [...]

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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, [...]

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With a few hours to spare, here are the most popular blog posts of 2009, based on number of visitors:

The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
Of Kosovo and .ks
Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
Is this the next language icon?
Google Translate now in 41 languages
Three [...]

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Just what the world needs — two more URL shorteners.
Google now has goo.gl.
And Facebook has FB.me.
But Google’s URL jumps out at me because it marks the first instance of Greenland (.gl) being used as a “countryless country code”
That is, the ccTLD is not being used to signify location, but for something totally unrelated.
I’ve compiled a [...]

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For a Westerner like myself, the most-popular Korean portals Naver and Daum are a maze of text and images. The pages are too busy, too distracting.
But I’m not the intended user.
Google Korea, as I mentioned in 2007, has big aspirations in Korea. So much so that it tried relaxing its austere design protocol. Here is [...]

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Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations?
After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two years, it was just a matter of time before Twitter adopted the same model.
Twitter is starting out with the FIGS (French, Italian, German, and Spanish). And [...]

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Here’s an article that confirms what consumers apparently know but many companies have yet to figure out — that English-language slogans don’t make much sense to people who don’t speak English. In this article, the German publication Spiegel actually asked people what a number of these English slogans meant and only 25% answered correctly.
But hey, [...]

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In February of this year, Google Translate surpassed 40 languages.
Six months later, Google added ten more languages, a two-year growth trajectory illustrated below:

Google went from 13 languages to 51 languages in less than 16 months.
Not bad.
And, yes, I’m aware that we must not confuse quantity of translations with quality of translations. Your translation mileage will [...]

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