Global by Design

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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