Global by Design

Adventures in Web Globalization

 

Entries Tagged as 'Google'

Google goes to Greenland to shorten your URL

December 15th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Business globalization · Country Codes (ccTLD) · Google

Google Korea: Before and After

December 10th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Google · Web Globalization

Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that

October 19th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Crowdsourcing · Google · Languages · Software Localization · Translation · Twitter · Web Globalization

There is no such thing as a global slogan

October 16th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Business globalization · Google · Translation

Google Translate: Now in 51 languages

August 30th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Google · Machine Translation · Translation