Global by Design

Two weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Babelfish — by relying on translator reviews.
Ethan has provided me with a mid-point summary of results, which I’ve included below. I was surprised to find that Microsoft and Babelfish are [...]

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Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but usually only when I want to compare engines. I haven’t used Babel Fish in years.
But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, [...]

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After more than a year at Microsoft, I have decided to return to Byte Level Research.
It was a tough decision to make. I enjoyed working with the many people who are passionate about globalization. And I enjoyed being a part of one of the most global companies on the planet.
But the time was right for [...]

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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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Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, so take this with a grain of salt.
Since Bing launched I’ve been thinking a lot about search engines and how I use them.
I’ve got two recent examples that illustrate why I think Bing might be onto something. Bing, for certain scenarios, cuts the clicks you must make to get the [...]

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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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My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts.
Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands.
Like who?
Apple, for one.
Here we have someone who apparently likes apples but isn’t Apple:

It appear that Microsoft reserved its account early on, though nothing [...]

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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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I’m happy to see Microsoft Research launch this new Web site widget.
I’ll have to test it out on my site when I get the time — and would love to hear from others who have tried it.
A demo site is here.
I really like how the widget creates a more seamless translation experience, which is a [...]

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