Category Archives: Google

Global by Design turns 1,000

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In 2002, I launched this blog.

It was the first blog devoted to web globalization. In fact, I don’t believe there were any blogs devoted to translation either at that point in time. So I really wasn’t sure where this whole blog thing would lead me. Perhaps I’d lose interest along the way.

Evidently, I didn’t, for today marks blog post #1,000.

I’m not the most prolific blogger to be sure (and I relied on a handful of guest articles along the way).

But it has been an exciting journey. I took a few minutes to page through the archives and I’ve included below a number of posts that jumped out at me (NOTE: a lot of the news links are broken):

In 2002, China had fewer than 100 million Internet users. Machine translation was more of a punchline than a business tool. And at the time you could count on one hand the number of web sites that supported 40 or more languages. Today, there are more than 23 such web sites.

I also took a stroll through Google Analytics. Though I didn’t have analytics in place during the early years, here are the three most popular blogs since 2005:

  1. Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing
  2. Google and the Global Traveler
  3. Google vs. Baidu: A User Experience Analysis

Thanks for reading over the years — and all your input and comments!

Google Translate App for iPhone: Will it hit number 1? (Answer: Yes!)

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I’m a little amazed by all the press that the Google Translate app for iPhone is getting today.

From The Wall Street Journal to the LA Times, this app is getting noticed.

And this app doesn’t even include the “Conversation Mode” feature that is currently included in Google Translate for Android app. It will be interesting to see how quickly Conversation Mode makes it into the iPhone given Google’s escalating mobile battle with Apple.

I checked the iTunes store a moment ago to see that the app is ranked at #16 in the Free category. Not bad!

Now, can it beat the mighty Sky Burger app for the number one spot?

I think it can.

PS: The Google Translate app supports 30 or so languages, which means its one of the most-localized apps on the iPhone (if not THE most localized).

UPDATE: One day later and, yes, the Sky Burger app has been unseated by Google Translate!

The Top 25 Global Web Sites of 2011

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I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card. This year, we reviewed 250 web sites across 25 industries. The web sites represent nearly half of the Fortune 100 and nearly all of the Interbrand Global 100.

Out of these 250 sites, here are the top 25 overall:

Google, which has held the number one spot for years, was unseated by Facebook this year. Facebook’s recent innovations (multilingual social plugins, improved global gateway, multilingual user profiles) gave it the edge. (I’ve devoted a separate report to Facebook’s innovations.)

Companies like 3M, Cisco, Philips, and NIVEA have become regular faces in the top 25. But there are some new faces as well. There are five companies new this year to the top 25: Volkswagen, Adobe, Shell, Skype, and DHL.

Although these 25 web sites represent a wide range of industries, they all share a high degree of global consistency and impressive support for languages. They average 58 languages — which is more than twice the average for all 250 sites reviewed.

The average number of languages supported by  all 250 web sites is 23, up from 22 last year. As the visual below illustrates, language growth over the years has been amazing. Seven years ago, I was thrilled to find a web site with more than 20 languages. Today, 20 languages is below average.

Language is just one element of web globalization, but it is the most visible element. When a company adds a language, it is making its global expansion plans known. If you want to know where your competitors are betting on growth, spend some time looking at their local web sites. More than twenty companies added four or more languages over the past 12 months.

Fast-growing languages on the Internet include Hungarian, Turkish, Indonesian, and Russian. Here is where Russian stands today — now found on nearly 8 of 10 web sites:

In the Report Card, languages account for 25% of a web site’s score. We also evaluate a web site’s depth and breadth of local content, the effectiveness of the global gateway, and overall global consistency. Beginning in 2010, we have also begun tracking how companies promote local social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter around the world. Our goal was not only to highlight the leaders in language but to identify those web sites and services that were globally “well rounded” as well as innovative.

The top 25 web sites are not perfect. The Report Card details many ways these sites could be improved (including Facebook and Google). That said, the executives who manage these web sites and services deserve a great deal of credit. As someone who has worked as both a consultant and an employee at companies such as these, I know how challenging it can be to get the funding to add languages and staff and to educate various teams on the many complexities of web globalization. While it may be the company names that appear on the top 25 list, it is the hundreds of passionate and bright people who got them there.

Congratulations!

Facebook is the best global web site of 2011

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Analysis for The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card is now complete, and Facebook has emerged in first place, narrowly edging out Google.

Last year, Google and Facebook tied for first place, so I want to be clear that both sites are global leaders in their own right. And I also will confess that comparing a social networking platform with a company that supports more than 40 web and client products is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

The goal of the Web Globalization Report Card is not only to highlight web globalization leaders (and their best practices) but also to shed light on the future of the Internet itself. From a multilingual perspective, Facebook has been quite innovative over the past year. And, more important, these innovations have broad implications for how millions of companies integrate social networks across their local web sites.

Facebook’s Social Plugins initiative has been enormously successful, with more than a quarter million web sites now supporting plugins such as the “Like” button. But what many have not noticed is that these plugins are also multilingual.

What this means is that if I insert a “Like” button on my home page (which I’ve done here), the language of this button changes based on the user’s language preference (assuming the user is logged in to Facebook).

Here is an example from the Byte Level Research site:

I used a German example to highlight a text expansion limitation. These plugins are not without rough edges, but it’s hard to argue with the direction in which they are taking the Internet. A multilingual social graph is being developed by the many millions of people clicking “Like” buttons. Privacy issues aside, it’s going to be very interesting to see where Facebook takes this platform as it matures.

Second, as I noted a month ago, Facebook recently began allowing users to modify their profiles to support multiple languages. This too is an important development. Perhaps this move was designed to increase advertising revenues. Or perhaps Facebook has a more noble goal of better serving multilingual users. Time will tell.

Facebook is far from perfect. I’ve been critical of its abuse of the globe icon (though Google has similarly struggled with global navigation). And Facebook will need to up its localization game if it’s going to win in a market like Russia, where VKontakte dominates.

That said, it’s hard to argue that Facebook, with 550 million web users (most of whom live outside the US), hasn’t done a lot of things right; it practically reinvented translation crowdsourcing, went from 2 to 74 languages in record time, and is clearly a company that all companies must follow closely in the years ahead.

The Report Card is now available.