Global by Design

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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: [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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