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.

Here are the top six country codes based on registrations:

1. Germany: 11,120,000
2. China: 6,035,000
3. United Kingdom: 6,010,000
4. Netherlands: 2,545,000
5. Italy: 1,426,000
6. United States: 1,300,000

According to my calculations, France would be ranked either 10th or 11th overall, depending on where Switzerland and Australia stand currently. These numbers are changing very quickly, with China on a fast pace to take over the number one spot and Russia and India making good progress as well.For more information on country codes (specifically ccTLDs) check out our new Country Codes of the World map.

This book provides a strong counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat.

While The World is Flat may leave an executive thinking We have to be in Brazil and Russia and China and India yesterday! Pankaj emphasizes a more measured, sober approach to expanding globally. He also makes a good case for looking beyond the BRIC countries.

Pankaj argues that there are very few truly global companies. Most companies are going through a phase of semiglobalization in which “levels of cross-border integration are generally increasing and, in many instances, setting new records, but fall far short of complete integration and will continue to do so for decades.”

Pankaj says that companies should ask themselves if they should even go global to begin with. At a minimum, he recommends that companies apply his “CAGE distance framework.” CAGE refers to the four types of distance that companies must overcome to succeed in a new market: Cultural, Administrative, Geographic, and Economic.

This is a dense book and it feels academic at times. But don’t let that stop you from reading it. It is an important book and could help many executives avoid a lot of headaches as they invest millions and millions in, say, Brazil or Russia or India or China.

Here is a blurb from a New York Times review:

Very few companies are globally global, Mr. Ghemawat observes. Even Toyota became No. 1 in autos by linking operations within the Americas, within Europe and within Asia, rather than across them. Definitions of region can vary — not just continents but trans-Atlantic, Greater China, trans-Indian Ocean, Eurasia — and Mr. Ghemawat examines a variety of regional hub strategies. But the latter, too, is no strategic panacea: regional platforms can grow into regional fiefdoms.

“Nobody has figured out the optimal way to organize a complex global economy,” he concludes. That is because no single optimal strategy exists. Companies are left to pursue what Mr. Ghemawat labels A.A.A:  — adaptation, aggregation, and arbitrage — or, in straightforward English, multiple variants of individual tailoring.

This map was designed to fit on a cubicle wall and include the major country code top level domains (ccTLDs) that a global Webmaster may encounter.

And although the map includes a whopping 180 ccTLDs, that is not all of them. To include all of them, I would have to develop a much-larger map, which is what I ended up doing.

And here it is, our newest and biggest map, shown below:

This map effectively includes all ccTLDs — 245 in all. Yes, there are more country codes than there are countries. That’s because you don’t have to be a country to have your own country code. The uninhabited Bouvet Island has a code: .bv. Even Antarctica has its own code: .aq.

This map also sizes the country codes based on the population of a given country or territory, which is why China and India feature so prominently. And this map also includes some key statistics regarding country populations and the most popular country codes based on registrations.

To learn more, go to www.bytelevel.com/map/ccTLD.html.

Which is what drove me to develop the Map of the World Wide Web.

This map aligns country codes over their respective countries. And it includes a color-coded legend for reference.

So now when I come across, say, .lv, I can know that its Latvia simply by looking at the map.

The map includes 180 of the 250 county codes currently in use. There are actually more country codes than countries, but that’s a whole separate post.

You can order here: www.bytelevel.com/map.

UPDATE: We also offer a larger, more in-depth version of this map at www.bytelevel.com/map/ccTLD.

AOL plans to expand into 14 markets over the next two years. And this is in addition to the portals it recently launched for India, Netherlands, and Austria.

AOL is also opening an office in China, though is wisely treading carefully in a country that has proven to be a financial black hole for other Western media companies.

I’m glad to see AOL going all out on global expansion. It’s easy to sit back and assume that Google and Yahoo! portals dominate the world. But when you start to look at individual markets you realize that even Google is not the leading search engine everywhere — like in China or Russia.

Will we see an AOL Poland two years from now? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Of course, the key to success ultimately has less to do with going global than going local. That is, how can a new portal succeed against entrenched portals within a given country? Who must AOL partner with? Should it try a radically different design or should it follow the leaders? Should it target a specific demographic? What application can you offer that the other portals don’t already offer? One new “killer app” could change everything for AOL in an instant — and that app could come from anywhere.

AOL has just gone live with its India Web portal as the company seeks to grab a growing slice of this rapidly growing market.

Says Ron Grant, AOL president and COO, “This is a very important — I would say critical — market for us. India has the highest priority in our international business.”

AOL already has a customer service center in India and roughly 2,000 employees.

MSN, Yahoo! and Google already offer localized sites for India, and local players such as Rediff and Sify are well established.

But I wouldn’t say that AOL is late to the party.

Depending on how you measure Internet penetration (particularly cyber cafes), India has between 20 and 50 million Internet users. This is a lot of people, but in a country of 1.1 billion, it’s really not that many at all.

This party is just getting started.

That time appears to be now.

Late last year, Cisco appointed Wim Elfink as the company’s (and America’s) first CGO. Wim will be based out of India and will manage the company’s new Globalization Center East. Wim was previously VP of Customer Advocacy, which is a clear sign that this position is as much about serving customers around the world as it is about development of global products and services.

Growing pains are to be expected, particularly as territory lines are redrawn between the CMO and CIO. But these are details. The big picture has been drawn, and it now includes a CGO.

The CGO is much more than a symbolic gesture. It is a sign of a company that understands that successful globalization begins at the top.

Cisco may the be the first to see the importance of a CGO; it certainly will not be the last.

PS: Here’s a recent AP article on Cisco’s CGO and what it will mean to other companies.

Given that Hindi was represented on just a handful of the 300 global Web sites we reviewed for the 2006 Web Globalization Report Card, that’s a pretty bold statement. Statistically, it makes sense. But the Global 1000 have yet to embrace Hindi on the Web in a big way.

Chinese (Simplified) is a different story. It is now the ranked 5th on our list of most-popular languages, up from 7th last year.

Here are the top five (after English):

1. German
2. French
3. Japanese
4. Spanish
5. Chinese

I used Adsense a year ago on my site and the revenue wasn’t much to get excited about. I didn’t like the sidebar clutter so I took them down after a month or so. But where $10 to $25/day isn’t much money to a small business it is a lot of money to a small business in an emerging market.

Which is what this USA Today article is about. Says the article: “Thanks to Adsense, a blogger in New Delhi can earn the same 5 cents for an ad-click as a blogger in Detroit. For many Adsense users in the developing world, that opportunity has become perhaps the most unintentional — and most successful — development program to spring from the online revolution.”

The article does note that fraud is a constant and looming issue, but still you gotta love the local success stories. Here’s one in particular:

Deepesh Agarwal, who runs a small cybercafe in Rajasthan state, India, draws about 90% of his income, or $1,500 a month, from his Adsense earnings. It is a princely sum in a state where the average income is just $300 a year.”Adsense has changed my life,” Mr. Agarwal says. “I can afford things that I was not able to before. I am planning to buy a new car. I can save for my future.”

On Friday, Borders announced a deal that would take it into the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. This is a joint venture with the Al Maya Group.

According to the press release, “The first of what is expected to be multiple Borders stores in the United Arab Emirates will be located in Dubai at Deira City Centre, the premier shopping center in the GCC. The Borders stores will offer a vast array of book titles in English and Arabic. Borders will provide training and marketing support to Al Maya. The store will be operated by Al Maya consistent with the Borders brand experience.”

Currently, Borders uses Amazon to sell books online. I have to wonder what the marketing folks at Borders are thinking as they expand into a market that Amazon does not support linguistically. That’s not to say Amazon can’t support Arabic, but the company hasn’t added a language since 2004, when it launched support for French in Canada and purchased Chinese bookseller Joyo.

Borders had a down year sales-wise domestically; internationally is where the growth is right now. Last year Borders CEO Greg Josefowicz said he was looking betting big on intl. growth and this is one step in that direction. India is the other big step Borders plans to take; Amazon is creeping in that direction as well.

Lionbridge had its Q3 earnings call this morning…

With one month of the BGS acquisition under its belt, Rory Cowan says so there have been only “pleasant surprises” about the acquisition. He said that had BGS been under their belt for the entire quarter Lionbridge would have hit $100 million for the quarter.

In Q3, Lionbridge won new work in government and with a “global shipbuilding company.” It is growing Merck to $7-8 million per year. Is doing more work with Google. I think Google could be a huge software client down the road if it begins to localize Web-based office applications. That said, Lionbridge is still awfully heavy into tech and software localization.

Other notes from call:

– Lionbridge is pushing Web-based translation memory tool Logoport hard. Has trained 1,000+ BGS employees on it.
- BGS had developed some machine translation software which will be integrated by Lionbridge with Logoport.
- Working through $15 to $20 million in cost reductions, a little more than half is due to head count. Consolidating offices in Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Beijing, Korea.
- Logoport could have a nice impact on margins by this time next year due to lower software (SDL/Trados) costs and translation memory leverage.
- Seeing the number of languages increase — up to 80 languages required for a recent cell phone launch.
- Seeing more US-ES work.

That said, not all analysts are so bullish about the Lionbridge numbers — a few on the call wanted to know “where’s the growth?” Lionbridge stock is current down about 7 percent.

Investment bankers use an acronym that is going to have a major impact on the future of the globalization industry: BRIC.

BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the four countries that pose the greatest opportunities for long-term growth among emerging markets. Of course, the key words are “long term” – these markets are anything but sure bets over the short term.

The localization industry has long used the acronym FIGS, which stands for French, Italian, German, Spanish, the most popular four languages chosen when companies enter Europe. CJK, for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, is also frequently used when expanding in Asia.

But I see BRIC gaining currency in the localization industry, because where investment bankers see growth so too do the multinationals who hope to capitalize on that growth. And while FIGS and CJK are geographically oriented, BRIC focuses purely on opportunity. This is great news for translators of Tamil, Chinese, Russian, and Portuguese and the vendors who learn to speak “BRIC.”

(NOTE: This essay is from the April issue of Global By Design — on newsstands everwhere!)

“It’s time a publishing house like Random has a presence in India. It will be publishing for India and in India,” Simon Littlewood, international director, The Random House Group.

According to the article, ” in the mid-1990s, cable TV started rapidly spreading across India and indigenous music channels started using a mixture of Hindi and English in their programming. What began as spoofs on the English used by Indians were soon transformed into a fizzy mix of the two languages. Suddenly, Hindi with a smattering of English acquired status.”

What I find particularly fascinating is that this new way of speaking, often referred to as Hinglish, is playing a growing role in advertising. According to the article, advertising has “started shifting from pure Hindi or English advertisements to Hindi with a few words of English thrown in. Thus the Pepsi slogan is “yeh dil maange more” (“ask for more”) while Coke relies on “life ho to aisi” (“life should be like that”).“

Although the company didn’t say which languages it plans to support (India has 15 national languages), this is a positive sign. It brings the total language count that Red Hat supports to 15.

According to ComputerWeekly, India “sees a great opportunity in India for Linux desktop deployments in education, e-governance, and small and medium-sized enterprise.”

Microsoft, to my knowledge, does not offer enterprise software in any Indian languages. Like I’ve written in the past, should Microsoft fall from its mighty perch, lack of localized software will be one of the reasons why.

Who’s going to be nipping at India’s heels? Countries to watch include Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and China.

Here’s what I found most fascinating about the article. Apparently Indian outsourcing firms are now outsourcing their outsourced work to other markets. Here’s the quote (FYI: BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing, the business buzzword de jour):

The growth of the BPO business in other offshore locations is also likely to be fueled by Indian companies setting up operations in other countries. The BPO initiative in Sri Lanka, for example, is led by two Indian companies setting up operations there

Globalization truly is a double-edged sword.

Here are two blunders from the article that are bound to be endlessly repeated by localization vendors and consultants (such as me) for years to come:

Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between “not specified,” “male” or “bitch,” because of an unfortunate error in translation.

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. “It cost millions,” [Microsoft's Tom] Edwards said.

In Microsoft’s defense, mistakes like these are endemic to most companies. Expanding into new markets always looks a great deal easier than it is.

If there is one lesson to be taken from Microsoft, it is that poorly managed localization is almost always more expensive in the end than no localization at all.

PS: Here’s another Microsoft anecdote from the Taipei Times:

One mistake that caused catastrophic offence was a game called Kakuto Chojin, a hand-to-hand fighting game. The fighting went on with rhythmic chanting in the background which in reviewing the game Edwards noticed appeared to be Arabic.

“I checked with an Arabic speaker in the company who was also a Muslim about what the chant meant and it was from the Koran. He went ballistic. It was an incredible insult to Islam,” Edwards said.

He asked for the game to be withdrawn but it was issued against his advice in the US in the belief that it would not be noticed.

Three months later, the Saudi Arabian government made a formal protest. Microsoft withdrew the game worldwide.