Global by Design

Toys ‘R’ Us has released its top 5 toy trends for the 2006 holiday season and trend number two was nice to see…
Trend #2: Bilingual Toys
Catering to the growing demand for products that promote dual language skills among children, toys that boast English and Spanish capabilities have gained momentum this year. Leading the list of [...]

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The Rockley Bulletin features a great article on the importance of using controlled vocabularies, particularly for documentation. The article cites a customer support call in which the word “jack” is cause for confusion on both ends of the line.
The challenge of controlling your company’s vocabulary is in first deciding who actually controls this vocabulary. Tech [...]

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When I first saw this Web site I couldn’t believe it — a school district Web site that supports 25 languages — that’s right, 25 — including Russian, Somalian, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi.
Punjabi? There are only a handful of billion-dollar multinationals that offer Web content in Punjabi.
But a school disctrict? A school district [...]

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By guest author:
Marc Garnaut
Spark Media Lab
I’ve been sharing my morning coffee for the past year or two with the “yee-ha”s of corporate wagons circling and the “forward-ho”cries of entrepreneurial cowboys heading out to the great frontiers. Yes siree, rarely a day goes by without the newspaper reminding me that there’s a gold rush going on [...]

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According to The Beijing News, via Rich Kuslan’s blog, Dell lost a suit against a research institute over the fact that its name sounds too much like Dell’s transliterated name.
Transliterated?
If this term is new to you, it is “phonetic translation” — such as creating a name in Chinese that, when spoken, sounds just like your [...]

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By guest author:
Saul Gitlin, EVP-Strategic Services
Kang & Lee Advertising - A Young & Rubicam Brands/WPP Group Company
As a non-Asian student in the 1980’s who graduated with a B.A. in Chinese language and history from Cornell, and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale focused on classical Chinese literature, I became somewhat of a “curiosity”for [...]

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Perhaps I’m a curmudgeon, but I don’t want to give up my old Yahoo! Web site for the “new and improved” Yahoo! that is coming — whether I like it or not — on September 1st.
Every day they remind me that the new site is coming, that my old site is being “retired.” Makes me [...]

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Quechua is the language of the Incan Empire and is spoken by roughly 10 million people throughout South America, the majority of whom live in Peru and Bolivia.
Recent developments suggest that this “minority” language is not going gently into that good night.
Google currently supports Quechua with a localized search engine.

And it is not the only [...]

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