Here’s an interview with the Philips Electronics CEO Gerard Kleisterlee.

According to the article, the company’s emerging-market sales increased 29% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now make up 34% of the company’s total sales. And it’s just getting started.

Some choice quotes from the interview:

The rush to emerging markets is there already for the last 10 years. What you have started to see is that, in many of these emerging markets, now you get growing local [Chinese] competitors who become either regional or aspiring global competitors.

It does not suffice to serve only the metropolitan areas. In India and in China you need to have good rural distribution.

For the emerging markets we have even more local responsibility. In general we try to push responsibility down in the organization and have everything necessary centralized. But for emerging markets we have done that even more than for the developed markets.

The Philips global web site finished in 4th place overall in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. Decentralization of control is a key ingredient of successful local web sites, particularly in emerging markets.

In the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, Hotels.com ranked close to last place in the web services category.

In this year’s Report Card, Hotels.com ranked only behind Google and Wikipedia — an impressive turnaround.

In just two years, Hotels.com added 19 languages, improved global consistency, and, most important, improved local relevance.

It’s nice to see the business press taking notice.

This Wall Street Journal profile of Johan Svanstrom, the head of Hotels.com’s Asia group, sheds light on why the company has done so well. The article begins:

Online travel giant Expedia Inc. had fewer than 20 employees in Hong Kong and no Chinese-language website when Johan Svanstrom took on his role as Asia-Pacific vice president of Expedia unit Hotels.com five years ago. Under 38-year-old Mr. Svanstrom, Hotels.com has added 13 new country-specific websites in the region and more than 160 staff.

Hotels.com is clearly betting big on Asia, and with good reason. Says Svanstrom:

According to the [International Air Transport Association], Asia Pacific overtook North America as the world’s largest air-travel market with 647 million passengers in 2009—a true milestone. When these people arrive at their destination, very many of them need a hotel to stay in. Add to that the fact that travel is one of the top three verticals of e-commerce and a natural pair with the Internet? All the stars are aligned.

I love to see profiles such as this; I hope to see more in the months ahead. Despite all the doom and gloom in the news these days, a lot of companies are booming abroad — and, in large part, thanks to smart bets on web globalization.

We define this industry segment to include those retailers (and a few food/beverage chains) that have a physical presence in the countries in which they do business. This excludes a company such as Amazon, and it greatly narrows the selection of global web sites, as most “bricks and mortar” retailers have been slow to expand into new markets. For bricks and mortar retailers, the world is not quite as flat as it is for their virtual competitors. To illustrate, the average number of languages supported by the retail web sites we studied was 13, well below the overall average of 22.

We included 11 retailers in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.

The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their web sites and applications for the world. It is now in its sixth edition.

Of the 11 retailers studied, IKEA emerged on top.

IKEA is no stranger to the top spot. It was an early leader in this space and has done an amazing job of balancing global consistency with local flexibility in every market it enters. IKEA was also one of the first multinationals to use a splash global gateway — which it still uses today (FYI: if you want to learn more about global gateways, check out the brand new edition of The Art of the Global Gateway).

Starbucks made significant improvements over the past two years, and adding eight new languages. Starbucks has also beenagressive in embracing social media around the world. For example, its German Facebook page — Starbucks Deutschland — has more than 175,000 followers (it gained more than 100,000 followers in the last seven months).

Best Buy has done an excellent job with its US Spanish web site, blogs, and community forums.

It will be an interesting site to watch over the next year as the company expands into Europe.

Here is the full list of retailers included in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Best Buy
• Build a Bear
• Godiva
• H&M
• Home Depot
• IKEA
• McDonald’s
• Starbucks
• Subway
• Tiffany
• Wal-Mart

Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, the world’s largest auctioneer of heavy equipment and trucks, recently launched a redesigned (and more global) web site.

Auction web sites are much like ecommerce web sites — that is, quite complex. You’ve got currencies and time zones and legal issues to navigate. And, in the case of Ritchie Bros, you’ve also got real-time global bidding.

To learn more, I interviewed Brad Cumiskey, Manager of Digital Marketing at Ritchie Bros. about the redesign.

Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your company and what drove you to expand your global presence

Established in 1958, Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers sells more equipment to on-site and online bidders than any other company in the world. The Company has over 110 locations in more than 25 countries and customers in more than 200 countries. Expanding our global presence has been an integral part of the company’s strategy for decades and the web site launch was a natural progression.

Q: How many languages do you now support? And when did these go live?
As of April 2010:

• Current inventory equipment search is available in 21 languages
• “My Account” services including past auction results are available in 14 languages
• Full service online bidding is available in 7 languages

Prior to the April launch, rbauction.com offered varying degrees of current inventory equipment content in 16 languages. Although full service online bidding and account services were only available in English.

Q: How long did the localization process take?

The bulk of the localization process spanned a six-month period; however localization activities continue on a daily basis. The localization function operates within the Ritchie Bros. marketing department and processes content for all customer-facing materials

Q: Did you rely on a vendor or do it in-house? And can you share a ballpark figure what you budgeted?

We supplemented our in-house translation expertise with external translation agencies. Internal subject matter experts are charged as ‘language owners’ and are ultimately responsible for the final delivered translations.

Q: What lessons did you learn that you can share with other companies planning to go global?

Engagement from fluent, in-house localization champions is crucial. In our case, our ‘language owners’ helped resolve translation conflicts and advocated for the customer experience in their native language.

Q: Any post-launch usage stats you can share? Any surprises?

Last week alone, rbauction.com received visits from 204 countries, with 22% of all web site traffic represented as non-English speaking. At this point in our history, the non-English market continues to grow, and is no longer considered a surprise. Notably, we see steady increases in web usage from non-English customers when we simulcast with live auctions being conducted in non-English markets.

As an example, last week Ritchie Bros. conducted 18 live auctions worldwide, including in Krakow, POL, Hyderabad, IND and Meppen, DEU. The locale sites for the surrounding markets saw pronounced spikes

Q: What was the most challenging language to add — and why?

Arabic proved to be the toughest locale to implement. The rare right-to-left orientation of a script created design challenges; also we had some problems moving content (think: cutting-n-pasting) between document types. Just to make things extra fun, we worked with an inconvenient 12-hour time zone difference between the head-office development team and the regional language owner

Q: Your local sites include a great deal of time/date/location data. How did you manage the internationalization and localization of this functionality?

Date, time, and location information are maintained within the web site’s content management administration system. Wherever possible, the development team made strict use of the content management framework’s internal localization functions. Excellent multilingual support was a ‘must-have’ in selecting a content management system. In the software selection process we took pains to ensure the solution would meet our requirements and prevent us from having to ‘fight the framework’.

Q: Not all web site features are currently available to all users. For instance, online bidding is available only in a third of the languages/markets. Are these limitations due to legal issues or simply a matter of rolling out in milestones?

No legal roadblocks, only the effort to develop and ultimately support the language. Ritchie Bros. has plans to increase language support to an ever growing list of locales, including expanding online bidding access beyond locales currently supported. We currently classify language support into one of three escalating groups:

• Read-only content support
• Interactive content support
• Full transactional content support

As we expand into new markets and extend our services to an ever increasing number of non-English speaking customers, we will undoubtedly increase the overall number of languages used for marketing and other customer-facing materials and services.

Link: Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers

I didn’t.

As shown in the screen grab below, the Jehovah’s Witnesses site supports nearly 400 languages!

In comparison, Wikipedia supports only 272 languages.

Google.com supports only 125 languages.

(It feels strange say use “only” and “125 languages” in the same sentence)

I should be clear that I’m using a liberal definition of “supporting a language.” Most of the languages supported by the Jehovah’s site contains very little content — about a dozen or so pages. This is also static content — the stuff that doesn’t require monthly or even annual updates. In fact, some of the content is so dated that much of the text is embedded within visuals — a very common practice back in the old days. Today, thanks to Unicode and Unicode-friendly fonts, modern OSs can display most of these languages — Windows far better than Mac.

Here’s a sample page in Oriya:

So given the wide range of languages, how does the site manage navigation?

It uses a “gateway” page (screen grab above) in just 20 languages. You have to click the cosmic globe icon to get the full list of languages.

Wisely, the site makes no attempt at a pull-down menu.

But what’s most interesting about the Jehovah’s Witnesses site is that it’s still adding languages.

That’s right.

Two months ago, when I first looked at the site, there were 292 languages. Now there are 299. Seven languages were added in two months — that’s more languages than most companies add in a year. Granted, we’re not talking about a lot of content, but you have to admire the initiative.

So how does this site compare with other religious web sites?

The Holy See supports just eight languages.

I also visited the Christian Scientist web site, as well as the two major Lutheran web sites and found only English.

Any other web sites I should mention? I doubt anyone is going to come close to challenging Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I’d love to see a little more competition.

Source: Twitter.com

Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered users are based outside of the United States.

And half of all tweets are in a language other than English.

This is a remarkable trend, particularly since Twitter has only been localized into five languages so far.

A few months ago, I set out to better understand how large, multinational companies are using Twitter to reach users around the world.

I studied more than 225 companies across 21 industry verticals (representing 80% of the Interbrand 100). And I interviewed a number of people who manage Twitter feeds in different markets.

This work resulted in the report Twittering in Tongues. This report is a first stab at a phenomenon that is very much in its early days, so it’s hard to draw any sweeping conclusions. But there are some clearly emerging trends, which I discuss. I also highlight a number of Twitter’s inherent international limitations and provide some recommendations for companies considering localized Twitter feeds.

Here are a few findings/recommendations from the report:

• Most companies have yet to launch international Twitter feeds. Only one-third of the 225 companies studied support one or more Twitter feeds outside of their domestic markets. What makes this ratio interesting is that every one of 225 companies studied supports two or more localized web sites. So these are all companies that do business in three or more countries. A number of companies that support more than 20 local web sites still only use Twitter for their domestic markets.
• Sony leads the pack with support for 20 international Twitter feeds, mostly through its Sony Music division. Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and PricewaterhouseCoopers are also out in front with support for 10 or more country specific Twitter feeds. CAVEAT: Counting feeds is a tricky business. Not all corporate feeds are actively managed (which I did not count) and not all local feeds are easy to find.
  
• Brazil rules. Brazil is by far the most popular Twitter market outside of the US. Nearly half of the companies that support one or more international feeds have targeted Brazil. Not surprisingly, Brazilian Portuguese is the second most popular language used on Twitter.
• Local Twitter success depends on local web site promotion. It’s also no surprise that the local feeds with some of the highest numbers of followers also had high visibility on their local web sites. Companies such as Dell and Samsung lead in this respect. Below is a screen shot from Samsung’s Brazil home page; Twitter gets prime real estate.
• Twitter is local by design. Based on my interviews, most of the in-country Twitter feeds have been launched without any central approval process or even awareness. This also applies to local Facebook and YouTube pages. The evolution is local Twitter feeds is similar to the evolution of local web sites in the 1990s. Back then, local offices often created their own sites, with their own designs and platforms. Over the years, the central offices reined in these disparate sites — sometimes going too far and dampening local enthusiasm. The key challenge I see executies facing now is balancing local control with global consistency. While consistency is important, it should not come at the expense of local enthusiasm and innovation. In the end, the success of local Twitter feeds depends on the local offices.

For more information:

• Report: Twittering in Tongues
• Twitter blog post on global growth

By avoiding them, you avoid stepping into any number of politically sensitive issues.

Nevertheless, companies love to use flags on their web sites.

And sometimes the use of flags can result in some rather curious implementations.

Case in point: I recently came across the global gateway for Swiss Air and saw something that can best be conveyed via video:

Did you see the “flashing” flag?

I’d be curious to know if residents of the UK and Ireland would be bothered by this hybrid flag. Perhaps it’s not a big deal, but the flashing alone made this flag stand apart from all others. Frankly, it looks silly.

The flashing flag is also included in the pull-down menu, as demonstrated below:

Had Swiss Air simply avoided flags in the first place, it would have avoided this issue altogether.

Flags can be troublesome. When it doubt, leave them out.

As of now, there is a new merger web site that features a hideously merged logo:

The United name lives on, merged with the Continental logo. this is a lose/lose scenario in my opinion. I liked the United logo better:

But what I really want to talk about are the two web sites — and which is the better one from a globalization perspective.

Although this merger is called a “merger of equals,” when it comes to the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, the two sites did not score equally.

As I noted awhile back, the airline industry as a whole is not a leader in web globalization. American Airlines emerged on top overall in this category. United finished in sixth place, but Continental finished in last place. So United is the better of the two sites — though I would recommend that both sites learn from American and Emirates, or, better yet,  look beyond their competitors altogether.

Airlines seem to have forgotten that people visit their sites to accomplish something quickly, and then leave. Case in point: Why in the world is there an ad for FTD flowers on the United Airlines web site?

The merging of the United and Continental web sites presents an excellent opportunity to start over. About ten years ago, airline web sites were considered fairly innovative. But they have largely stagnated since, replaced by more innovative travel sites such as Kayak and Tripit.

There’s a great opportunity for an airline web site to effectively reinvent airline web sites — not just in one language, but across all languages. The new United may not be off the best first step with this logo, but we shall see.

Lionbridge is hosting the webinar and attendance is free.

The date and time is May 20th at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

You can register online here.

And here is what you’ll get out of the call (if I do my job well):

In this comprehensive one-hour webcast, John will draw on findings from his 2010 Web Globalization Report Card and provide insights on the best global web sites, highlighting language trends, navigation tips and emerging trends. Websites profiled include Facebook, Apple, Starbucks, and more.

By attending this webinar, you will learn:

• The hottest languages on the web today
• Why Facebook was able to go from two to 70 languages in only two years
• How companies such as Apple and Google benefit from global design consistency
• How global communities can improve your localization efforts

And bring lots of questions! I hope you to see (hear) you there.

And here is why this page is worthy of a web globalization post.

Shown below is a screen grab from the Facebook page. Notice how the promo copy is in both English and French. In both blurbs, the text is asking you, the reader, to click the “like” button.

Now here’s where things get interesting.

The “like” button is in English, not French. So, naturally, the French text asks you to click the “J’aime” button. But the J’aime button doesn’t exist on my English-language user interface.

Fortunately, Facebook does the heavy lifting for you.

If you have your UI language set to French, you will see the J’aime button, as illustrated below. The Air France page remains the same but the UI language has changed.

Because Facebook is well localized, Air France can create one promotional page in two languages and let Facebook take care of the UI elements.

It’s an interesting strategy — though one that clearly won’t scale to support many more languages than that. But it is an approach that I could see companies using for heavily bilingual audiences. After all, it’s easier to toss out one promotional page than two.

However, I’m not taking into account whether the mixing of languages makes the page more effective with its respective French- and English-speaking users. and act upon. This is what truly matters in the end.

UPDATE: As Fredrik noted in his comment below, Air France only allows US residents to participate in this contest — and doesn’t let you know until after you’ve registered. So I’d say Air France is not getting “liked” by those outside the US.

The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world.

Out of those nine companies, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu emerged on top. The site was also ranked 20th overall, which places it in very good company.

Here are a few reasons why Deloitte did so well.

For starters, Deloitte supports an impressive 34 languages, in addition to English.

PricewaterhouseCoopers actually came out ahead with support for 35 languages, but because it lagged Deloitte in global consistency it finished in second place in the category.

As shown below, Deloitte makes use a global template that is consistent across its many local websites, ranging from Deloitte.com…

To Deloitte Germany:

From global branding to operational efficiency, I can’t overstate the many benefits of global consistency. And keep in mind that global consistency need not inhibit local flexibility. Global templates should in fact be flexible enough for all regional and local offices to effectively address their markets. Global consistency effectively frees up the local offices to focus on local content. And Deloitte does this quite nicely.

Deloitte could still improve its global gateway. Although the gateway is generally well positioned in the header, Deloitte uses a very long pull-down menu that is not well localized. I would recommend changes along the lines of what I wrote about eBay last week.

To Deloitte’s credit, however, the website does use geolocation to automatically direct users to local web sites.

Finally, Deloitte was the first company in this category to support multilingual RSS feeds. It has since begun supporting local-language Twitter pages.

For example, here is a screen grab of the Deloitte Spain Twitter page:

Deloitte provides Spanish-language content for 221 followers, which may not be a massive number, but it’s a start. The key here is that Deloitte’s local offices are doing much more than simply focusing on their own websites to engage users. Localization these days is about so much more than translation, and Deloitte well understands this.

Here are the nine professional services websites included in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Bearing Point
• Capgemini
• Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
• Ernst & Young
• Jones Day
• KPMG
• Manpower
• McKinsey & Co
• PricewaterhouseCoopers

eBay has invested significantly in web localization over the years and it is a top-20 website in countries such as France, Italy, and the UK (Alexa).

But it could do more to help more people find these local sites.

Between January and March of this year, eBay updated its global gateway.

I’ve included screen grabs of the before and after gateways below. In both cases, eBay’s gateway is positioned at the bottom of the global (.com) home page. This new design has not been rolled out to all markets yet.

Before:

After:

The second version looks a good deal more elegant than the first, which is an improvement. But I doubt the new version is significantly more effective than the earlier version.

That’s partly because the country names remain in English, as opposed to being translated into the supported language of each market. And this is a shame because a casual observer might assume that these country sites are available only in English, which is not the case.

For example, if you speak only Chinese and you arrive at www.ebay.com, you have to recognize “China” to get to actual Chinese-language content.

Below is the gateway from eBay Germany. I include it here to illustrate how eBay has “over-localized” the gateway.

That is, the country names have been localized for German speakers. But the irony of this global gateway is that there is not much of a reason for a German speaker to navigate to, say, the Chinese site. Instead, each country site should be displayed in its respective language — or languages if more than one is supported. The upside to this approach is that this gateway doesn’t have to change from local site to local site.

Now, just to put eBay’s navigation in perspective, I assume that the majority of visitors to the local sites enter through the “front door” of ccTLDs, such as www.ebay.fr and www.ebay.de. So what I’m highlighting here is not a critical flaw in the greater scheme of things, but it’s a flaw nonetheless.

So what do I recommend?

For starters, eBay should use “Deutschland” instead of “Germany” and “Sverige” instead of “Sweden.”

You get the idea.

Next, I would promote this global gateway to the upper right corner of every eBay site. Not the entire panel as it exists now. Just a globe icon that links to a global gateway page. This way, users can easily find or change their current country setting.

And I’d begin testing geolocation as a way to direct people seamlessly to their local sites based on IP address. Geolocation has become much more popular over the past two years. In our 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, more than 25% of the sites studied use geolocation specifically to improve global navigation.

That said, geolocation should never be used before a company has its visual elements in place, which eBay does not (yet). Users hate nothing more than a web site that does things without the user having control over them. Google is famous for this.

In case you’re wondering, eBay was ranked 114th out of the 225 sites reviewed in our Report Card. The site actually scored quite highly in both global consistency and localization, but navigation remains a weak spot.

ICANN not only answered my question about China, but also about a host of additional countries (and territory) that had applied for fast-track IDNs.

Here are the most recent IDN (string evaluation) approvals:

• China (cn): 中國 (traditional); 中国 (simplified)
• Hong Kong (hk): 香港
• Palestinian Territory (ps): فلسطين
• Qatar (qa): قطر
• Sri Lanka (lk): ලංකා (Sinhalese); இலங்கை (Tamil)
• Taiwan (tw):  台湾 (simplified); 台灣 (traditional)
• Thailand (th): ไทย
• Tunisia (tn):  تونس

For the full list of IDNs now in the ICANN pipeline, I’ve created a page here. It also explains why you may not be able to view all of the scripts on this blog post.

ICANN says it has given preliminary approval for IDNs in 19 countries across 11 languages. Note that this means that these IDNs have passed the string review, which is arguably the most difficult phase. But there is still one stage left before those domains can go live. And don’t get me started on the challenges that some of these domains will pose to existing web browsers — that’s the topic of a future post.

I should preface this post by saying that I find “meta” travel sites like Kayak and Sidestep much easier to use than any airline web site. A few years of recession coupled with the airlines’ collective descent into charge-for-everything madness appears to have stalled any major usability improvements. And yet improvements were made, at least in web globalization, a few of which I will highlight.

We included nine airline web sites in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.

The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their web sites and applications for the world.

Of the nine web sites studied, American Airlines narrowly edged out Emirates Airlines for the top spot.

Since 2008, American has added four languages and has begun using geolocation to improve global navigation. The site also leverages a fairly consistent and locally adaptable design template. Shown below are the home pages for Japan and Russia:

The designs do exhibit one common localization problem — embedded text.

For example, you may have noticed on the Japanese site that the text string “always low fares” was not translated. This text string is embedded within a visual element — which is generally more difficult (and expensive) to localize. I’m assuming this text string wasn’t within the localization budget.

A more efficient alternative is to simply keep text out of the visual elements (relying on Javascript and CSS to create an embedded appearance). Doing so allows all text to be more easily extracted for localization.

In terms of global gateways, I give Emirates a slight edge:

Emirates uses this gateway as a landing page. Once a selection is made, the preference is captured as a cookie so the user doesn’t have to land on this page repeatedly. The languages supported by each localized site are evident and, more important, properly localized.

Organizing countries by region can be a complex and geopolitically sensitive issue — particularly with countries that may be viewed as straddling two regions. But I thought Emirates did a good job overall of managing this issue.

There are no airlines web sites in the top 25, so there is clearly room for improvement — but American and Emirates are out in front.

Here are the nine airline sites included in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Air France
• American Airlines
• British Airways
• Continental
• Emirates
• KLM
• Northwest Airlines
• Ryanair
• United Airlines

The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their web sites and applications for the world. It is now in its sixth edition.

Of the nine hotel/resort companies studied, the InterContinental Hotels Group emerged on top.

The corporate home page, www.ihg.com, is included below:

InterContinental is a conglomerate of seven hotel brands, including Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza.

The company does a nice job of positioning its global gateway in the upper right corner of not only its corporate home page, but also the home pages of its many brands.

Here is Crowne Plaza:

InterContinental:

And Holiday Inn:

There is still plenty of room for improvement. Notice the reference to “Queen’s English” in the Holiday Inn gateway. I’ve rarely seen this description used in a global gateway and I’d recommend against it. “British English” or “English UK” is more common.

Even though InterContinental emerged on top, it did not lead by much. Accor, Radisson, and Starwood all finished within a few points of it.

The hotel industry as a whole is not one I would call a leader in web globalization. Not yet.

Nearly all of the companies could improve on global consistency as well as depth of localization. I also found it odd that a few of the most global hotel chains supported so few languages. Hotel web sites support an average of just 10 languages — less than half the average of all 225 web sites studied.

Best Western stood apart, however, with support for more than 20 languages.

We did notice a number of incremental improvements since the last Report Card. For instance, two of the hotel web sites have since added support for geolocation. And I’m optimistic that we’ll see language growth accelerate this year as hotels step up their efforts to attract tourists from around the world.

There is reason for optimism — the World Tourism Organization forecasts growth in 2010, with more than one billion international arrivals.

Here is the full list of hotel/resorts included in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Accor Hotels
• Best Western
• Four Seasons
• Hilton
• Hyatt
• InterContinental Hotels
• Marriott
• Radisson
• Starwood Hotels

And of the 12, Volkswagen emerged on top.

Volkswagen is one of the more globally consistent automotive web sites. In general, automotive sites are behind the curve in global consistency, so it was nice to see so many country sites leveraging the same global design template. Shown below are VW’s Italian and Finnish web sites:

Volkswagen also leads the category in global navigation, with a global gateway that is visually engaging, albeit a bit over-engineered, shown below.

Volkswagen also began supporting geolocation within the past 18 months, which is great to see, as it helps most users bypass the global gateway altogether.

While Volkswagen is ahead of its peers, you may have noticed that there were no automotive companies in the top 25 list.

The automotive industry is generally behind the curve in web globalization. And I should note that automotive web sites generally are ahead of the curve in language support; Toyota, for example, supports 41 languages.

But languages alone do not make a great global web site. Volkswagen did not lead in languages, but it did lead in a number of other categories, making it the best automotive web site of 2010.

Here is a full list of automotive brands included in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Audi
• BMW
• Honda
• Hyundai
• Lexus
• Mercedes
• Mini
• Nissan
• Porsche
• Smart
• Toyota
• Volkswagen

And global reach doesn’t always mean expanding beyond borders, it could also mean expanding within borders — consider Spanish for the US (a trend that continues to tick upward).

That said, any executive with global aspirations is sure to wonder at one point or another: How many languages is  enough?

It must seem that every year, the definition of “enough” inches upward.

The Web Globalization Report Card proves this to be true.

In 2003, when we began the Report Card, 10 languages was widely considered  enough for a global web site.

Today, that baseline is 20+ languages.

As you can see below, the number of languages that companies support has steadily grown over the years. In the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card — in which we tabulated the languages of 225 global web sites across 21 industries — the average was 22 languages.

I’m not suggesting that companies add languages for the sake of adding languages.

But I do suggest that companies conduct regular “audits” of their own language mix, the languages supported by the competition, and the languages supported by the ecosystem as a whole.

I’d prefer to be the first company within a given industry to support a new language than the last. Only by keeping a close eye on languages and the competition can you achieve this goal.

Consider Russian. Five years ago, fewer than 40% of the major global web sites supported this language. At that point in time, a company might not have felt any pressure to localize for Russia simply because few other companies did so. Today, seven out of 10 companies now support Russian, which means that companies that hope to do business in Russia and do not support Russian are now in the minority.

Now let’s look at three companies in more detail: NIVEA, Starbucks, and Genzyme.

Each of these companies occupies a different industry sector and yet all three continue to add languages, each at its own pace.

For more information on language trends and much more, check out the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.

If your company is in this list of 200 and you want to know where you ranked, please contact me at jyunker (at) bytelevel (dot) com and I’ll provide that information.

I don’t want companies to buy this report simply to find out where they ranked. The goal of the report is to help companies get better — no matter what their score. This report even provided advice for Google to improve its score — and it ranked #1.

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Cisco Systems
4. Philips
5. Samsung
6. Wikipedia
7. 3M
8. NIVEA
9. Symantec
10. Lenovo
11. Xbox
12. Autodesk
13. Gmail
14. Microsoft
15. Nokia
16. Intel
17. Caterpillar
18. Panasonic
19. HP
20. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
21. LG
22. Volvo Group
23. Hotels.com
24. SAP
25. Kodak

Google has emerged on top again, but just barely.
The big story this year is that Facebook and Google finished in a numerical tie. But because Google supports more languages (for now), it edged out as the winner.

Moving down the list, there are a number of familiar faces — companies like Cisco and Philips, Panasonic, and NIVEA. But there are some new faces as well. Samsung jumped up in the rankings due to improvements to global navigation and localization. Kodak, Symantec, and Autodesk are also new to the top 25.

Although these sites represent a wide range of industries, they all share a high degree of global consistency and impressive support for languages. They average 50 languages — which is more than twice the average for all 225 sites reviewed.

20+ languages is the new baseline
Even as we look across all 225 web sites, the number of languages continues to increase. Although the rate of language growth slowed over the past two years — due in large part to the global recession — growth continues. This year, the average number of languages increased to 22, up from 20 languages in 2008.

It wasn’t that long ago that any web site that supported 10 languages would have qualified as “global.” The new baseline is 20 or more languages, and climbing.

I will be posting additional findings in the days and weeks ahead. If you want to learn more, we’ve posted a brochure here.

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 me to move on.

I approached Midge Raymond regarding the possibility of returning to Byte Level and, after much negotiation, she extended an offer.

I am now working with Midge on the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. As Midge noted a few weeks ago, a lot has happened over the past 18 months. You’d think a global recession would have kept web globalization to a minimum, but the data is showing continued growth.

Shortly after the report publishes, I will be making time for consulting projects. If you need someone to evaluate your company’s web site, train your web and marketing teams, or conduct a conference call on web globalization best practices, please contact me at Byte Level.

Geolocation is gaining momentum

PricewaterhouseCoopers is now using geolocation to improve global content delivery. So too is Audi. And we have yet to detect a company that has stopped using it. We’ve advocated geolocation for many years, but not before having a solid visual global gateway in place, which many companies do not yet have.

We still love the Caterpillar gateway:

Companies keep adding languages

It’s looking as if we’ll see an average increase in number of languages supported across all web sites studied so far. And this will be significant because a number of companies have actually reduced the number of languages they support, also a notable trend.

Hotels.com has more than doubled the number of languages it supports, to more than 30. Apple also boosted its global reach over the past 18 months, a sign of its global ambitions.

And now back to the web sites. Still more to analyze…stay tuned.

First some data points. Looking ahead at the 2010 census:

• 50 Million Hispanics will be living in the US
• Nearly one in six US residents will be Hispanis
• Los Angeles County is expected to be home to the largest Hispanic population in the US – exceeding that of Costa Rica

Two slides jumped out at me. The first slide noted:

Only 3% of respondents found Spanish language sites more trustworthy and useful than those in English, leaving an important percentage of the Hispanic segment feeling underserved.

Why? Because all too often localized Hispanic sites are simply literal translations of the English sites. And these web users want much more than literal translation. After all, most of them can migrate easily between English and Spanish sites.

So what exactly do they want from the Spanish sites?

The following slide sums it up:

You can download the survey here.