Global by Design

Idea Factory Languages, with 85 full-time employees and production centers in Brazil and Argentina, specializes in translation and localization for the Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese language markets.
CEO Teddy Bengtsson periodically sends out “state of the business” updates which I always find interesting. I asked him if I could pass along his note and he said [...]

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Languages are a means to an end, and in web globalization, languages help you expand your global reach.
And global reach doesn’t always mean expanding beyond borders, it could also mean expanding within borders — consider Spanish for the US (a trend that continues to tick upward).
That said, any executive with global aspirations is sure to [...]

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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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Whenever I read this site’s web logs, I’m always fascinated by the number of referrals via Google Translate.
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 [...]

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Earlier this year, TED began recruiting volunteers to translate its recorded presentations, known as TED Talks.
It looks like the venture is off to a strong start. According to TED, more than 1,500 volunteer translators have provided more than 1,000 translations in more than 50 languages. And another 1,000 translations are in the works.
September 18, 2009 [...]

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There are shortcuts on most English keyboards for entering characters such as á and é.
But I can never seem to remember what those shortcuts are.
Fortunately, there is TypeIt, an online editor that gives you the ability to input non-ASCII characters used by languages such as Spanish, Hungarian, and Russian. Here’s a screen shot:

Operating systems like [...]

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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 [...]

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Bing recently added a nifty new translation feature — one that is so simple and in many ways so obvious that I can’t help wondering why Google never got around to doing it. But that’s a topic for a later post.
For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing [...]

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It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are two very important developments that every companies needs to be aware of — and possibly champion.
That said, I do wonder how this article is going [...]

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Does this icon say “language” to you?
It doesn’t to me.
But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote this icon as a global standard.
I applaud the effort and I fully agree that there is a need for such an icon, but I don’t believe that [...]

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