1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Cisco Systems
4. Philips
5. Samsung
6. Wikipedia
7. 3M
8. NIVEA
9. Symantec
10. Lenovo
11. Xbox
12. Autodesk
13. Gmail
14. Microsoft
15. Nokia
16. Intel
17. Caterpillar
18. Panasonic
19. HP
20. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
21. LG
22. Volvo Group
23. Hotels.com
24. SAP
25. 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 edged out as the winner.

Moving down the list, there are a number of familiar faces — companies like Cisco and Philips, Panasonic, and NIVEA. But there are some new faces as well. Samsung jumped up in the rankings due to improvements to global navigation and localization. Kodak, Symantec, and Autodesk are also new to the top 25.

Although these sites represent a wide range of industries, they all share a high degree of global consistency and impressive support for languages. They average 50 languages — which is more than twice the average for all 225 sites reviewed.

20+ languages is the new baseline
Even as we look across all 225 web sites, the number of languages continues to increase. Although the rate of language growth slowed over the past two years — due in large part to the global recession — growth continues. This year, the average number of languages increased to 22, up from 20 languages in 2008.

It wasn’t that long ago that any web site that supported 10 languages would have qualified as “global.” The new baseline is 20 or more languages, and climbing.

I will be posting additional findings in the days and weeks ahead. If you want to learn more, we’ve posted a brochure here.

But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, but this is only based on anecdotal feedback and personal experience.

Years ago, IBM developed an algorithmic method of measuring MT quality known as the BLEU score. Google scored well here, but the BLEU score is not without its critics.

Translation, like writing itself, is as much an art as it is a science.

Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines. And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Enter Ethan Shen and his start-up venture Gabble On.

Ethan has set out to recruit a few thousand volunteer translators to compare the three free translation engines. He asked me to help get out the word. He promises that he will publish the results for all to see. He’s also offering a free Apple iPad to one lucky volunteer. I have no financial interest in the project. I’m just curious to see what engine comes out on top.

Here are the details from Ethan:

We are seeking functional to fluent speakers of any two languages to take 5 minutes to judge and submit their opinion in our dynamic comparison engine (until March 29, 2010). At the end of the 6 week voting period, we will be publishing our results publicly in hopes that our research can to contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge in this field.

In gratitude for your participation, we are awarding one new Apple iPad to a lucky participant. The survey can be found at: www.gabble-on.com/SurveySelector.aspx.

Which engine do you think is best?

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.

1. The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
2. Of Kosovo and .ks
3. Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
4. Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
5. Is this the next language icon?
6. Google Translate now in 41 languages
7. Three rules of global gateway design
8. Kindle goes international, but not multilingual
9. Bit.ly is leaving Libya for the islands
10. Countryless Country Codes

Perennial Favorites
Don’t ask me why these posts continue to rank highly, but they do:

• Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing
• Watch out ProZ, here comes Google Translation Center
• Google vs. Baidu: A User Experience Analysis
• Is Facebook “translation worthy” or just plain cheap?
• iTunes Going Global

Happy New Year everyone!

I’m really looking forward to 2010…

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 growing list of Countryless Country Codes.

As always, if you have any sites for me to add, post a comment below.

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 what the site looked like (up until earlier today):

Apparently, Google still had some relaxing to do.

According to Ohmy News:

Google Korea announced last week that they will integrate “Blog, People and Hot issues links on the upper menu page, with Picasa, Gmail, Textcube and other Google services occupying the lower half,” thus effectively copying the style of Naver and Daum. At the end of the day, even the mighty Google could not fight against the tenacious local culture.

The list of global online brands that have failed to win over the local audience by insisting on their original site design optimized for the western users is long. MySpace heard their death knell last February and Linden Lab could not renew the contract for Second Life with the Korean partner, ending their two year experiment in Seoul.

So today Google launches Google.co.kr, Version 2.

So what do you think? It looks a bit more like the competition.

But the larger question is how far Google will go to localize itself for a market. This is a question every global company must answer. At what point does a company go too far?

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 here is a video tutorial from Twitter that shows you how how the platform works.

Crowdsourcing is the new black these days, and much of it deserved. But despite the buzz, companies should be very careful before embracing the model.

Very few companies are translation-worthy

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, TED, and Twitter have legions of fans who are happy to lend their translation skills. But few corporate sites or services are so translation worthy. And there’s the ever-constant risk of translator backlash or burnout. We are in uncharted territory, and as more companies pursue this model, we’re going to see more and more efforts backfire. Hey, maybe we’ll even see companies begin to “pay” their volunteers in non-monetary forms of compensation. Which leads me to…

Crowdsourcing may not save you much on translation

The translation platform, the management of the platform, the management of the volunteers — they all require resources. And the odds are that you’ll still want to retain professional translators to manage the amateurs, which is not a bad thing. There is a peace of mind in having a vendor who does this sort of thing for a living signing off on a newly localized web site before it goes live. In the end, translation crowdsourcing is not about saving money.

As far as I can tell, Twitter has only a thousand or so text strings that require translation. In the time the company devoted to building this translation platform, it could probably have had the site localized in 50 or more languages.

Over time there probably will be cost savings, but I would argue that cost savings should not be the motivator and probably wasn’t the motivator for Twitter.

The platform companies develop to support crowdsourcing should have other measures of success, such as user engagement and testing, partner opportunities, and developer involvement.

For example, on the Twitter Translate information page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Will my favorite applications be translated, too?
We know that Twitter is not all about Twitter.com, so our global reach shouldn’t be limited to Twitter.com either. That’s why we’re planning to give our developer community access to the translation files so they can create wonderful apps that use the translations, too.

This is where Twitter is headed with the platform, as well as Facebook and Google. Once you have the platform, you can get creative with it — expand it to developers so that they can quickly localize their apps. You can even try to open up the platform for “partner” sites to use — which is what Facebook is now doing.

As companies comes to grips with social media, they are slowly learning to let go. Employees blog and tweet. Customers post content on corporate sites, and now they are co-creating the localized products.

The top-down localization model is giving way to the bottom-up model, and this is a profound change, even if it’s limited to a handful of companies — albeit companies that represent a few hundred million users. I’m still trying to understand how far this phenomenon will go.

But hey, those slogans are cool to look at, right?

Here are two German examples:

I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2006, when I predicted that companies would eventually do away with global slogans. It seems to me that the next generation of global brands won’t have them and won’t need them. I pointed out at the time that Google didn’t have a global slogan, but apparently I overlooked YouTube. Even Google has fallen for a lure of the global slogan.

Nike tried to translate “Just Do It” but gave up and just used the slogan globally. So perhaps the “global slogan” is here to stay.

But my advice to companies just getting started — avoid them if you can. The risks generally outweigh the rewards.

Until there is a “global consumer” there is no such thing as a “global slogan.”

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 most certainly vary by language pair. Still, as language pairs go, Google is the only game in town across many.

Here are the 10 most recently added languages:

• Albanian
• Afrikaans
• Belarusian
• Icelandic
• Irish
• Macedonian
• Malay
• Swahili
• Welsh
• Yiddish

On a related noted, 41 of these languages are now incorporated into Google Docs.

Every month there seems to be more of them, which could mean that the quality of Google Translate is improving, or this site is doing better in the rankings, or some combination of the two. Or, it could be simply be that more people have discovered Google Translate.

Given my passion for country codes, it’s fair to say that I also enjoy language codes. And it is through language codes that you can figure out what languages users were translating your site “from” and “to.”

Here is one referral string from my site:

First, you can see that the person was using Google Korea, so it’s fair to say the person was translating from English into Korean. The “To” line is actually the blog title post translated into Korean.

That was an easy one.

This next one is a bit more challenging:

This person was using Google.com, so you have to focus on the language codes. There are two here — an “id” (which follows  “hl=”) and an “en” (which follows “sl=”). What this means is the person was translating from English into Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia).

Here is what the translated page looks like:

The quick and easy way to know the target language is to focus on the “hl=” string. In the screen shot below, the target language is German.

And here is a language code reference if you want to study your web logs.

What I want to know is what percentage of web traffic is taken up by Google Translate. Anyone care to share their Web log stats?

Based on my cursory analysis, I would estimate the figure to be between 5% and 10%, but that’s very rough.

I appears though that Google still has a thing or two to learn about scanning covers…

Firefox 3.5 is now out and available in more than 70 languages.

Yes, 70 languages.

Naturally, I was curious to learn how many languages the other browsers currently support. Here is a rough list:

• Internet Explorer 8: 63 languages
• Chrome: 63 languages
• Opera 9.6: 36 languages
• Safari 4: 16 languages

I say “rough” because I didn’t verify every language and I might be off by one or two. I was surprised at how few languages Safari supports; 16 languages used to be a lot not that long ago. But not anymore.

And I think it’s safe to say that Firefox is the most global browser on the market today.

If you want to see how popular Firefox is around the world, check out the real-time download map here. The last I checked there were 23 million downloads with 5 million coming from the US, followed by Germany, Japan, and France. I particularly like how you can look up countries by ccTLD.

And on a separate note: If you enjoy watching real-time downloads, here’s another map that I found oddly hypnotizing — Zappos purchases as they happen: www.zappos.com/map/

Since Bing launched I’ve been thinking a lot about search engines and how I use them.

I’ve got two recent examples that illustrate why I think Bing might be onto something. Bing, for certain scenarios, cuts the clicks you must make to get the information you need — or at least the information I need.

Checking a sports score

I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan. When I want to get a Cardinals score, I often go to ESPN, but that site loads so slowly and is so busy that I have been going to Bing lately and just entering “Cardinals” in the search window. Here’s what I get:

Bing gives me a nice summary of the Cardinals schedule. If there’s a game going on at the moment, I get a real-time sports score, which is nifty. Google, as shown here, only gives me a link to the Cardinals’ site. Another click, instead of a score.

Checking on a flight

My wife flew to Oakland recently and I wanted to check on her flight. So I entered the flight number into Google and Bing. Here’s what I found:

I got the arrival time so I knew when I could call her.

Google gives me a link to another site that will give me the details that Bing already gave me.

Google got to where it is today by prioritizing speed. Austere web design and massive data centers gave its search engine a massive advantage over everything else out there.

But speed isn’t just about how quickly a search page loads, it’s about how quickly you find what you’re looking for. If a search engine knows you’re looking for a sports score and not a sports team web site, it can save you a click and, as a result, save you time.

Time is clicks. You save people time by saving them clicks.

Granted, I’m probably not the most objective observer of the Bing vs. Google debate. So what do you think?

Are these two Bing innovations going to stick?

For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing and Google (to save you time I created pre-loaded hyperlinks):

• Translate I love you: Bing vs. Google
• Translate I love you into Chinese: Bing vs. Google
• How do you say I love you in Italian: Bing vs. Google

Below are screen shots of the first text string in both Bing and Google. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Google, despite its massively powerful translation engine, doesn’t simply answer your translation question. Instead, it provides links.

I realize that this is a relatively minor feature and that it currently only supports a small number of very common text strings, but it’s still a very handy feature for a translation geek such as myself.

Now, I’m not saying Bing is perfect. When it comes to technical searches — or when I just need to look up a Wikipedia article quickly — Google still does better, sometimes far better.

But I’m glad to see Bing integrating translation in an intuitive way. It’s a feature that I’ll be using again.

PS: Here is the blog announcement of this feature from Microsoft Translate team.

I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000.

From my humble perch, I’d say web globalization is alive and well. Perhaps searches are going down because more and more people already know what it is — at least that’s how I choose to see it.

And while I’m wasting an evening on Google, here’s one of its newest features, the Wonder Wheel:

It’s nifty, though I’m not sure I would use it more than once. And what the heck is Walmart doing there?

Walmart failed in Germany and Korea and is still bleeding cash in Japan — not exactly what I would call a web globalization success story. Walmart finished in the bottom 10 of The Web Globalization Report Card.

In other Google news, I added Friend Connect to this site — up on the upper right corner. Apparently Google now offers real-time translation of comments, so I’m hoping to give it a spin.

Let me know what you think…

UPDATE: I just removed it. It was really slow in loading. Instead I inserted my Twitter feed. I just noticed that the Chinese characters that were supported just fine in Twitter didn’t make it across into my feed as Unicode. This is interesting because I have WordPress setup for Unicode. I’ll have to do some digging.

Maybe I should have titled this post The Rise and Fall of Wordpress Plugins.

According to the unofficial Google blog, Google has inserted its “translate” link into a number of localized Google sites — such as France and Spain. Google.com is not yet included.

This is just another sign that translation is becoming a core element of Google’s world domination strategy. If you’re curious about Google’s market share around the world — here’s an interesting “crowdsourced” document.

Here is the France home page:

I rarely ever use this pull-down menu and I wonder how many others do. I realize that Google strives to keep an austere home page and this is one solution — but I’m not sure it’s worth it. If users can’t find the translation link they may never use it.

Google Translate is no longer growing up, it’s growing out — integrating itself across all of its many properties.

As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global.

Om Malik recently reported some key stats from Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.

I haven’t tried it yet. It looks like you have to post PDF files and then link to them to trigger the translation engine — not exactly what I’d call user friendly. But it’s a start..

This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in itself not bad.

But I particularly like the minor tweaks made to the site’s interface. As shown below, you can now click on your language to make it one half of a language pair — a welcome alternative to the pull-down menu, which continues to grow.

What I would like to see — and I suspect is less than a year away — is the ability to simply enter a URL and have Google auto-translate that Web site into your language without you having to specify your language. Google should already know this based on your locale setting — or at least let you set that preference ahead of time.

Google Translate can auto-detect the language for you right now — but you have to ask it to do that. Perhaps the processing overhead is such that Google doesn’t want to turn on this feature by default.

So, will Google support 70 or so languages a year from now? I doubt it, given the current economic climate. As Google notes on its blog, these 41 languages already address 98% of all Internet users. I assume that Google will focus less on language expansion and more on integrating Google Translate into its products as well as improving the UI.

To give you an idea of just how aggressive Google has been in this area, here is a screen grab of Google Translate from 2006:

And here is one from today:

That’s roughly twice the number of languages in two years.

Microsoft has also been busy over the past year. Like Google, it now supports machine translation using its own in-house engine.

And it also offers a handy Web translation widget that you can insert into your Web page to allows users to self-translate your site into their language.

The portfolio of languages is still on the light side, but like I’ve mentioned before, these types of developments illustrate that machine translation (despite its inherent limitations) is becoming a critical piece of the Web globalization puzzle.

UPDATE: Here’s an interview with Google MT researcher Franz Och.

Inspired by our Country Codes of the World map, I developed a smaller version that includes the ccTLDs currently in use by Google for its local search engines.

As you can see here, Google has quite a few ccTLDs in use — more than 160, including Andorra, Kenya, Ukraine, and Ghana.

Why did I pick Google?

Because I know of no other company that hosts localized Web sites across so many different country codes. These may only be search engine interfaces, but they are still significant. While plenty of multinationals have registered hundreds of ccTLDs, few have put them to use so extensively.

And Google has room to grow — there are more than 250 ccTLDs available.

It’s also worth noting that Google redirects visitors to its .US domain to .COM, which I think is short-sighted. As I’ve written before, .COM is not synonymous with USA.

I have a few other companies in mind for this visual treatment. I’ll keep you posted.

This map is free and you can download a PDF here.

The post I wrote on the Google Translation Center has been the most-visited page on this blog over the past month. Clearly, Google has struck a nerve in the translation industry — and its service is not even live yet.

The Translation Automation User Society does not appear to be as welcoming as I am of the Google Translation Center. A new essay on its site says:

Private companies will always seek world domination and customer lock-in. As a professional in the translation industry, the Google Translation Centre may help you on the short-term, but you only help Google long-term and you don’t help the world at all. Ultimately we pay the price for putting all translated words and sentences in the possession of a single company.

There is a distinct “evil empire” tone to this essay, which is understandable to a point. Google appears to be entering that evil empire stage of its development. Though I still use the search engine.

And the last I checked, Google’s “terms and services” page for the Translation Center had been taken down. So I can’t really say what Google’s policy will be regarding the translation memory (TM) that it may or may not leverage from this Center.

But it is no coincidence that TAUS is planning to develop a massive database of TMs of its own. I’m sure it wants readers to come away thinking that TAUS is going to be far more open with its TMs than Google will be.

TAUS says that its TM database will be free to the world for the looking up of translations of terms and phrases. But you’ll have to be a member to actually have access to the database (on a reciprocal basis) and membership is not free. I’m confident that this database will be of the highest quality as TAUS has some impressive corporate members, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle (Google does not appear to be a member).

Personally, I’m glad to see both services emerging — as well as services from Asia Online and Language Weaver (which is now offering a Web-based SaaS translation service). We are entering uncharted waters and it’s important to have a mix of large and small players, as well as a nonprofit, to keep everyone on their toes.

Is there a risk to the world if Google owns the world’s largest TM (which it might have already accomplished)?

Perhaps.

TAUS raises important questions. The answers have yet to emerge.

I remain a big proponent of using ccTLDs. After all, Google is not the leading search engine in all countries, particularly China and Russia.

I’d love to see Google do more in helping Webmasters understand how to manage content across multiple country Web sites. There is great concern over hosting duplicate content (which Google penalizes) and continued questions about managing multiple languages within a specific country.

(thx to my brother for the heads up on this post)

My biggest concern is slow-loading Web pages. And, yes, I know the quality of the translation will leave plenty to be desired, but what I really like about the widget are the little RSS feed buttons. Just click the button and you can have translated feeds delivered to whatever feed reader you use.

What I don’t understand is the significance of the name “mloovi.” Am I missing something?

But here comes Google…

According to Blogoscoped, Google is about to launch the Google Translation Center.

This is an exciting development, though I don’t expect everyone to suddenly ditch ProZ for Google. Why? Because much of the appeal of ProZ is the community, which Google does not appear to be trying to support. Still, freelancers will certainly want to investigate this potential new resource.

I’ve called out ProZ as one company under threat from Google Translation Center. But EVERY translation agency needs to keep a close eye on this service. It could be a threat. It could also end up being something translation agencies use themselves — instead of paid platforms from SDL. Naturally, for this to happen this new platform has a lot of evolving to do. Still, I can’t help but wonder.

There is no mention of whether or not Google will support machine translation and/or translation memory. I’m assuming they will.

I have LOTS of questions and this service isn’t even live yet. So we shall see what happens. But this is big news, no question.

I wrote awhile back, that the translation industry as we know it is over. The technologists have taken over and they’re bringing brute force computing and massive networks to the table to reduce costs and increase time to market. This is just another sign of this macro trend.

What do you think? Is Google going to disrupt the translation industry or is this new platform going to fall flat?

(Thx Chris for the heads up!)

Update: I just read an insightful article on this Google’s service at GigaOm…

Here is a graph they published of the rate of growth of their language support. It’s a very impressive visual, but I found it potentially misleading.

What is being displayed is not the total number of “unique” languages Google supports, just the total number of product/language combinations. And that’s an important detail.

Google is nowhere near supporting 1,400 different languages. Their search engine interface, which supports roughly 120 languages, represents the maximum number of languages the company supports. And this number has only increased by about 10 languages over the past two years.

The other Google applications appear to have peaked (for now) at between 40 and 43 languages.

To support 40 languages is remarkable. Based on my survey of 225 global Web sites in the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, fewer than 10 companies support 40 or more languages (English excluded).

Still, it looks as if Google is now focused on getting its increasingly wide selection of software up to the 40-language mark rather than aggressively pushing into brand new languages. Gmail, for instance, now appears to be adding a language or two per year — rather than 10 to 20, which is the pace we’ve been seeing with YouTube and Blogger.

Being the globalization geek that I am, I couldn’t help but check out the home page of Yahoo! Spain, which features a localized header, shown here:

And then I noticed that the home page of Yahoo! Germany was also localized for the home team.

So who the heck was Yahoo! rooting for?

Everyone, it seems.

Which highlights a delicate issue for multinational Web sites — that of not appearing to root for one country over another. The golden rule of course is to simply treat each country equally. This is easy to do when it comes to localizing headers, but not so easy when it comes to providing equal levels of customer support, product documentation, and so on.

Yahoo! is not alone in navigating these waters. Here is Google Germany:

Interestingly, you can’t view this German page by simply entering google.de. You need to use a German-based IP proxy.

And now here’s my second Web globalization thought: Why does the Euro 2008 Web site support vastly more languages than the Beijing Olympics Web site?

Here is the Euro site, with support for 9 languages.

And here is the Olympics site, with support for just English, French, and Chinese.

I find it ironic that an event that is billed as a global event supports fewer languages than an event that has Euro in its title. Euro 2008 even supports Japanese, Chinese, and Korean even though these countries don’t have participating teams.

I realize that the Olympic Charter specifies just two official languages: English and French. And the host country generally adds its local language to the mix as well. This rule makes sense for signage, announcements, etc. But I don’t see why the Web site should support only three languages.

The argument can be made by the Olympics that they simply cannot justify financially supporting every language of every participating country. But I still don’t buy it. If Euro2008 can support 9 languages, the Olympics can and should do better than three.

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.

But if you visit the Chinese home pages of these five companies, you’re going to see the following:

Although white more commonly signifies death and mourning in China, black is a more effective way of expressing grief on the white background of a Web page.

Google China and Baidu have turned their logos black as well.

It’s just a shame more of the world won’t see these sites — as I found them quite moving. Everything about China seems to be beyond comprehension, including, unfortunately, this earthquake.

I’m referring to the breadth of languages and breadth of features that Google Translate supports.

Today, Google announced that Google Translate added support for ten more languages, bringing the total to 23. The ten new languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

And that’s not all!

Google Translate also now provides a detect language tool that will tell what language a batch of text is in. This type of tool can come in awfully handy for people like me who navigate across so many languages on a daily basis. It’s an easy feature for Google to support because the translation engine needs to know what the source language is before translating it. But I also tested language detect on a few languages not yet supported for translation, such as Slovakian, and the engine correctly identified them.

A week ago, I integrated Google Translate into the home page of Byte Level:

When it comes to translation, I’m not a good example of “putting my money where my mouth is.” Byte Level Research, with the exception of the Tower of Babel site, has been available only in English for years.

While I have no illusions that this widget will make up for a lack of professionally translated text, I am curious to see if people use it and to what extent. What I need to know is if Google Analytics can track Google Translate widget usage so I can know which languages are most popular. If anyone knows how to set this up, please contact me.

And, if nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment — and it buys me time before having to shell out real money for professional translation, which I will ultimately need to do.

In this article, I do just that, and I render a verdict as to which Web site is better.

Search

The best way to compare search engine quality is to compare searches.

I recently input three Chinese keywords for my experiment:

• 许霆 (Xu Ting: A Chinese citizen who was recently involved in a controversial criminal case)
• 次级房贷 (Subprime mortgage)
• 看羹吃饭 (Kan-Geng-Chi-fan: A phrase used and recognized by a relatively small number of Chinese, meaning that you have to think carefully before taking action)

These keywords represent three different categories of information people search for online. Xu Ting is a hot keyword in China at the moment but it has received little international media coverage. Subprime mortgage, on the other hand, is a foreign concept and the term has been transliterated into Chinese characters from the English equivalent. Kan-Geng-Chi-fan is used within a specific dialect that is not used by the majority of Chinese citizens.

Okay, here are the results as of April 18, 2008:

“Xu Ting”

• Baidu: 2,000,000 results
• Google.com: 1,440,000 results
• Google.cn: 1,330,000 results

It would seem that Baidu knows much more about Xu Ting than Google, although I did not verify that every result referred to this particular individual.

Interestingly, in the first results page of both google.com and google.cn, one of the search results directed users to Baidu Post — Baidu’s popular user forum.

Overall, I would rate both sites equally because the top 20 results from each search engine were highly qualified and I could easily find information I wanted from there. Verdict: A tie.

“Subprime mortgage”

• Baidu: 1,050,000 results
• Google.com: 387,000 results
• Google.cn: 1,540,000 results

This time google.cn appears to do much better than Baidu. But if we look closely at the top 20 search results, we’ll find there are 7 results at google.com and 5 results at google.cn that direct us to Web sites that use traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and by the overseas Chinese community.

It can be rather challenging for the mainland Chinese to read traditional Chinese, though they can understand most of the message. Nonetheless, this mix of simplified and traditional Characters is not the most user-friendly approach. Verdict: Baidu wins.

“Kan Geng Chi Fan”

• Baidu.com 207 results
• Google.com 4,000,000 results
• Google.cn 247,000 results

At first glance, Google produced overwhelmingly more information than Baidu. However, if we examine the details, Google did not perform so well. Neither Google.com nor Google.cn produce an accurate search result within the first 10 pages respectively, while all the 207 search results from Baidu are accurate. Verdict: Baidu wins again.

Based on these three searches, Google comes across as a bit complicated and “foreign” to Chinese users. Baidu is the superior Chinese search engine.

Products

Both Google and Baidu are trying to leverage their network effects to promote other products. Google has many excellent products, but not every product has performed well in China. For example, Google Maps is widely used by American users. Unfortunately, Google Maps in China is unable to provide the same features due to unavailability of mapping data in China. Google’s satellite map currently only covers the major Chinese cities. Should Google acquire better maps, it would have a clear advantage over Baidu, which doesn’t offer the same degree of functionality and usability in its map tool.

Although music copyright is a controversial issue within China, the market reality is that millions of Chinese Internet users download free music online. Baidu understands this reality and its music search product — which presents a list of links for free music downloads when people search by song, singer, or label — is extremely popular. Google is unable to compete with Baidu in this regard due to its adherence to US copyright laws.

Another example is Baidu Post, an online forum allowing Internet user to create new topics based on search keywords and provide commentary. When people search online by keyword, they can also follow these keywords to Baidu Post, where they may find additional information — or at least find out what others think of the selected keywords.

Online forums are a very important medium in China for distributing information online. I think an important reason for this is because the Chinese, as well as many businesses, want to remain anonymous. While this may change in the years ahead as the next generation embraces social networking sites, for the time being, online forums are dominant. Baidu also offers a blog platform (Hi Baidu) while Google has localized Blogger into Chinese, very few Chinese people currently use it.

Local culture and consumer behavior are critical factors in determining whether a product will succeed in an overseas market or not. So far, Google products have not been as appealing as Baidu to Chinese users.

The Brand Name

The name of Baidu (百度) is from a beautiful Chinese ancient poem:

Thousands of times, I looked for my girl;

Suddenly, at some point, I stopped and looked back,

I found she was just over there among a bunch of lanterns.

This poem, written by Qiji Xin, who lived in the Song Dynasty nearly 1000 years ago, is still very popular in China and also taught in high schools. Baidu in Chinese means thousands of times. In Chinese culture, this poem communicates one’s desire to achieve his/her dreams. Obviously, meshes well with the services offered by Baidu, a company that claims it better understands Chinese users and Chinese culture.

Google started to use its Chinese name Guge (谷歌) in 2006. Guge (goo-ge) is transliterated from Google and it literally means “the song of grain” in Chinese. A survey conducted in 2006 shows 84.6% Chinese do not like this name. I think the most important reason is that Chinese people want to feel international and modern. This is also one reason you may see many Chinese companies using English words in their marketing materials, as it creates an international effect. The “song of grain” presents an image of the agricultural society that the Chinese people are striving to break away from.

Google has exerted a good deal of effort in localizing its name for China but it has not yet been accepted by the Chinese people. It may take some time. Some companies have chosen to simply use their English names in China, avoiding localization altogether, such as IBM.

To sum up, Baidu definitely has an edge over Google in China. But it is early yet and Google has been doing things such as redesigning its Chinese home page, which may resonate with users. The key takeaway here is that every new market is a new challenge; just because you are number one at home does not mean you will be number one in every country you enter. Should Baidu enter the US market some day, it will face many of the same challenges that Google is now facing in China.

I was a few months off.

Today, Google announced Q1 results. According to Google, “revenues from outside of the United States totaled $2.65 billion, representing 51% of total revenues in the first quarter of 2008, compared to 47% in the first quarter of 2007 and 48% in the fourth quarter of 2007.”

Granted, foreign exchange rates played a role in this as well. But the point is that Google has benefited greatly from smart and aggressive Web globalization. Localizing Google Adwords into 40+ languages appears to have paid off nicely.

Google was ranked #1 in the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card.

Google today unveiled a “Year of the Rat” logo on its home page:

And, wouldn’t you know it, so did Baidu:

Interesting times.

PS: Here is Yahoo! China…

Crowdsourcing is a hot new buzzword that is best illustrated by Wikipedia — you take a lot of motivated volunteers, give them access to your Web site, and let them go crazy. I’m simplifying things of course, and crowdsourcing is no cure-all. People sometimes game the system for various reasons. But the net result can amount to something that could never have been created without the crowd involvement.

Now, Wikipedia has next to no money and it’s a non-profit; crowdsourcing is not just a great strategy but a necessity.

And crowdsourcing can be a great way to localize your Web site.

Google relied on crowdsourcing in its early years to translate its search engine interface into more than 60 languages (and still relies on the technique in more limited ways today). Netvibes relied on volunteer translators to quickly localize its interface into more than 60 languages.

Naturally, the idea of having your Web site translated for “free” is alluring to a lot of companies. But very few companies will find that they are translation worthy. Web users will not bother to translate a Web interface if they don’t actually see a need to use the product itself in their native language.

So Is Facebook Translation Worthy?

You can’t fault Facebook for trying to get some free translation help, and I suspect that it will find plenty of volunteer translators, though it will take time. But a part of me can’t help wondering why the company hasn’t just coughed up a few dollars to get its localization efforts moving sooner rather than later. After all, doesn’t the company have a market value of, like, $100 billion?

The challenge with crowdsourcing translations is that nothing is truly free. Facebook has to dedicate people and resources to create the translation workflow and approval processes to ensure that the finished translations are of high quality. These things take time, and time also costs money.

Given the importance of acting quickly when it comes to taking social networking sites global, it seems to me that Facebook would be wise to pay for localization for some core languages and then use crowdsourcing to support the less-strategic languages. This way, Facebook could accelerate tackling those markets that are already seeing Facebook knockoffs (like the Russian knockoff shown below).

Relying on volunteers to translate content is an emerging trend — one that can give a company a tremendous advantage over its competition. And I think we’ll see many more companies try this strategy in the years ahead.

But before getting started, ask yourself: Is our Web site translation worthy?

UPDATE: Techcrunch provides additional details on Facebook’s translation efforts.