Global by Design

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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? [...]

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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 [...]

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