Global by Design

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Google marches ahead with its machine translation engine, adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician.
This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in itself not bad.
But I particularly like the minor tweaks made to the site’s interface. As shown below, you can now click on your language to make [...]

[Read more →]

I was on the Boingo Web site recently and I encountered a language picker with “English Intl.” listed as an option, as shown here:

This was not the first Web site I’ve encountered to offer an international English option — and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
Now what does international English actually look like?
In most [...]

[Read more →]