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.

Back when I started out, I wasn’t sure how long I would stick with this “blogging” thing and I didn’t really want to make any investment in software (besides time).

I tried a few different platforms before settling on WordPress.

It was free — certainly a selling point. But it’s wasn’t the easiest blog to install or maintain in the early years. ISPs weren’t exactly offering it as a one-click install back then. And don’t get me started on the challenges of updating plug-ins.

But WordPress has certainly come a long way.

I was surprised to learn that, thanks to volunteer contributions, WordPress is now available in more languages than Blogger or TypePad.

• TypePad is available in nine languages.
• Blogger/Blogspot (owned by Google) is available in 49 languages.

WordPress is available in more than 60 languages.

Not bad.

And now WordPress is now launching a software translation platform: GlotPress.

Makes sense. Offer to others the very platform you used to localize your software.

I’ll be interested to see how this new platform develops.

Today we officially kick off a sixth edition of the Web Globalization Report Card.

The next four weeks will be devoted to analyzing 225 web sites across more than 20 industry categories. You can view a list of companies we plan to include here.

This list will likely evolve as we discover new companies to include along the way. If there are any web sites that you want to see included (no promises, of course), email us at reports (at) bytelevel.com.

Raising the Bar: Changes for 2010

The Report Card is used by companies not only as a benchmark but as a tool for driving change internally. This means our methodology must evolve with each report.

So we’ve made a few key changes for 2010.

Languages

In 2003, when we produced the first report, only two companies supported more than 30 languages. This year, I expect to see more than 25 companies surpass 30 languages. In 2010, a company needs to support 42 or more languages to achieve a perfect score. And there were will be several that achieve this.

Community

User-developed content and social networking applications will also factor into scoring in 2010. This is a big change, but an important one. Traditionally, translation has followed a “top-down” model, in which companies decide which content should be translated and into what languages. And because there are only so many translation dollars to go around, a great deal of content is left untranslated.

Now, companies are beginning to leverage the crowd not just to translate content but also to create communities in which content is created in the target language from scratch. In other words, the center cannot hold. Companies that embrace the community — in all countries and cultures — are going to be best positioned to succeed in the years ahead.

Global Gateways

In 2006, we began evangelizing the four-part approach to global gateways, combining geolocation, language negotiation, visual elements, and ccTLDs. This year, we provide the most detailed view yet of which companies are supporting which types of global gateways. And it’s particularly exciting to see so many companies now using globe or map icons — something we began advocating years ago.

Growth Amidst the Recession

Although many companies reduced their web globalization budgets over the past eighteen months, many others did just the opposite. This is what makes this field is so dynamic — and, at times, completely unpredictable. I think you’ll be surprised to see just how many companies have expanded their global presence recently.

I’ll keep you posted as we near publication.

1. The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
2. Of Kosovo and .ks
3. Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
4. Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
5. Is this the next language icon?
6. Google Translate now in 41 languages
7. Three rules of global gateway design
8. Kindle goes international, but not multilingual
9. Bit.ly is leaving Libya for the islands
10. Countryless Country Codes

Perennial Favorites
Don’t ask me why these posts continue to rank highly, but they do:

• Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing
• Watch out ProZ, here comes Google Translation Center
• Google vs. Baidu: A User Experience Analysis
• Is Facebook “translation worthy” or just plain cheap?
• iTunes Going Global

Happy New Year everyone!

I’m really looking forward to 2010…

The “age gateway” was a topic I wrote about a year ago and I’m glad to see others chime in on the sheer futility and stupidity of the device.

I mean, really, does this little gateway really keep out the underage?

Or does it simply load up a database with millions of people born on 1/1/>21 years?

I don’t believe there was any Supreme Court ruling that mandated age gateways, was there?

No. I think it was lawyers at one or two large breweries that got this thing started. And the rest of the alcohol producers just followed along. Better to be safe than sorry right?

That is, until one of the breweries removes the gateway — or vastly simplifies it — and doesn’t get sued.

And, more important, get significantly higher numbers of repeat visitors.

I’m already seeing signs of alcohol producers simplifying the gateway. As the Smashing Magazine article notes, there is the age gateway of Christiania Vodka which simply asks Are you over 21 years of age?

Users click Yes or No.

Simple.

And sure to be copied by others.

The lesson here is to be careful what “standard” design elements and gateways you choose to replicate on your site. There are design standards of course, such as the ubiquitous shopping cart icon, which we can safely assume that consumers are well accustomed to using. But not all design elements should be replicated. Just because the major breweries all require users to painstakingly enter their dates of birth does not mean this is a best practice.

I predict that a year from now we’ll see a dramatic shift towards the more user-friendly Yes/No model demonstrated by Christiania Vodka.

Best practices sometimes emerge from the fringes. I’ve seen similar trends in web globalization. Google, for example, was the first company to openly solicit volunteers to help it localize its web site — way back in 2002. Today, it’s safe to say that translation crowdsourcing has gone mainstream.

The 2010 Web Globalization Report Card is now in development. It will be interesting to see what new trends — both good and bad — have emerged and are still emerging.

But I guess I should expect nothing less from one of the world’s largest translation agencies.

Lionbridge wants to know what social media you use.

If you enter your email address, you’ll get the results.

Here’s the link.

PS: I just took it and it did take only 5 minutes. But it’s a rather clunky survey. At first I thought the only sites it would ask me about were Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. I had to click through to the next page where I found the “global” list of social media sites, which will be much more relevant to folks in, say Germany (Xing) and Brazil (Orkut).

But I’m not the intended user.

Google Korea, as I mentioned in 2007, has big aspirations in Korea. So much so that it tried relaxing its austere design protocol. Here is what the site looked like (up until earlier today):

Apparently, Google still had some relaxing to do.

According to Ohmy News:

Google Korea announced last week that they will integrate “Blog, People and Hot issues links on the upper menu page, with Picasa, Gmail, Textcube and other Google services occupying the lower half,” thus effectively copying the style of Naver and Daum. At the end of the day, even the mighty Google could not fight against the tenacious local culture.

The list of global online brands that have failed to win over the local audience by insisting on their original site design optimized for the western users is long. MySpace heard their death knell last February and Linden Lab could not renew the contract for Second Life with the Korean partner, ending their two year experiment in Seoul.

So today Google launches Google.co.kr, Version 2.

So what do you think? It looks a bit more like the competition.

But the larger question is how far Google will go to localize itself for a market. This is a question every global company must answer. At what point does a company go too far?

More than three-quarters (77%) of British consumers prefer to use a .uk rather than a .com when searching for information on the Internet.

Clearly, you have to hold these numbers at arm’s length. But I would agree in general that people have an affinity for their country codes. And any company that is planning to localize for the UK would be wise to use .uk.

It should be as easy to understand as a stop sign. Form and function and nothing else.

You don’t want people getting confused, waiting for animation to load, or just missing it altogether. This happens all the time.

The fashion house Céline sure keeps it simple:

In one page you know exactly what languages the site supports and there is no chance you’ll miss it. I certainly didn’t.

What other global gateways exhibit such minimalism?

I like it. The languages are presented in the native scripts. The user has to select one before entering the site. Most of all, I like that the languages aren’t hidden behind a pull-down menu.

Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations?

After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two years, it was just a matter of time before Twitter adopted the same model.

Twitter is starting out with the FIGS (French, Italian, German, and Spanish). And here is a video tutorial from Twitter that shows you how how the platform works.

Crowdsourcing is the new black these days, and much of it deserved. But despite the buzz, companies should be very careful before embracing the model.

Very few companies are translation-worthy

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, TED, and Twitter have legions of fans who are happy to lend their translation skills. But few corporate sites or services are so translation worthy. And there’s the ever-constant risk of translator backlash or burnout. We are in uncharted territory, and as more companies pursue this model, we’re going to see more and more efforts backfire. Hey, maybe we’ll even see companies begin to “pay” their volunteers in non-monetary forms of compensation. Which leads me to…

Crowdsourcing may not save you much on translation

The translation platform, the management of the platform, the management of the volunteers — they all require resources. And the odds are that you’ll still want to retain professional translators to manage the amateurs, which is not a bad thing. There is a peace of mind in having a vendor who does this sort of thing for a living signing off on a newly localized web site before it goes live. In the end, translation crowdsourcing is not about saving money.

As far as I can tell, Twitter has only a thousand or so text strings that require translation. In the time the company devoted to building this translation platform, it could probably have had the site localized in 50 or more languages.

Over time there probably will be cost savings, but I would argue that cost savings should not be the motivator and probably wasn’t the motivator for Twitter.

The platform companies develop to support crowdsourcing should have other measures of success, such as user engagement and testing, partner opportunities, and developer involvement.

For example, on the Twitter Translate information page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Will my favorite applications be translated, too?
We know that Twitter is not all about Twitter.com, so our global reach shouldn’t be limited to Twitter.com either. That’s why we’re planning to give our developer community access to the translation files so they can create wonderful apps that use the translations, too.

This is where Twitter is headed with the platform, as well as Facebook and Google. Once you have the platform, you can get creative with it — expand it to developers so that they can quickly localize their apps. You can even try to open up the platform for “partner” sites to use — which is what Facebook is now doing.

As companies comes to grips with social media, they are slowly learning to let go. Employees blog and tweet. Customers post content on corporate sites, and now they are co-creating the localized products.

The top-down localization model is giving way to the bottom-up model, and this is a profound change, even if it’s limited to a handful of companies — albeit companies that represent a few hundred million users. I’m still trying to understand how far this phenomenon will go.

The position is with a very large global company based outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Here is the job description:

The Marketing Manager-Localizations position will report to the Mgr-Localization and Content Management and lead the daily operations of the Global Information Management System. This includes working with the technology team to support workflows and issue escalation as well as liaising with affiliate counterparts via global meetings and phone calls. Also includes defining TM strategies and recommending future direction.  Priorities include localization project execution, resource assignments, and user administration as well as issue management. This role helps in developing ongoing strategies for future implementations and integrations.

The successful individual will leverage their proficiency to…

• Deep knowledge of the SDL WorldServer system
• Sound understanding of linguistic requirements, Translation Memory, Terminology Database and glossary management
• Strong background in Production management
• Technical understanding of functionality and capabilities of the WorldServer system.
• Development of strong partnerships with regional and affiliate localization teams

If you meet the qualifications and are interested, send your resume to me at jyunker (at) bytelevel (dotcom) and I’ll forward it along to the HR manager.

NOTE: That this is not a paid posting and I get no finder’s fee.

I came across one that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time — it’s the home page of a promotion Hyatt Hotels ran several months ago.

The site is still live here.

It’s a visually engaging global gateway and I love the many translations of “welcome” in the center of the page. Unfortunately, this gateway demonstrates three practices companies should avoid repeating. I’ll call them rules.

Rule #1: Global gateways should place function above beauty

I’ve got nothing against a great-looking web page. But job number one is getting users to where they want to go, and quickly. In the case of Hyatt, all those “welcome” languages are engaging, but they’re not clickable, something I learned when I tried clicking on “Bienvenido” and then “Benvenuti.” They’re just design elements.

The only clickable links on the entire page are at the very top and the very bottom of the page, which leads me to the next rule.

Rule #2: To paraphrase Steve Krug, don’t make users think about what language or country they need to select

The global gateway should require no thought whatsoever. But let’s say I speak German and I land on this page. I could click the “Europe” link at the bottom of the page or I could click the “Deutsch” link at the top of the page. Which do I choose? The very fact that I have to think about it means the design is flawed.

What’s interesting here is that if you select “Europe” a list of available languages will appear below it. Why not just have those languages there all along? Perhaps that would have helped. I think so. But the fact that there are two selections that the user must decide between is inherently bad design.

Rule #3: Don’t pretend you speak languages that you don’t

What’s really unfortunate about Hyatt’s gateway is that some of the “welcome” languages are not supported by localized web pages — such Greek and Slovenian. This could give visitors the impression you support their language when you really don’t. Not a great idea. Managing user expectations is critical, particularly when it comes to localized content.

Fortunately, the Hyatt gateway was temporary.

What do you think? Was I being too hard on the site? And are there any rules you would add?

According to the Seattle PI:

Starbucks recently opened stores in the Czech Republic, Amsterdam and Poland. And it has plans for a big push in China.

Starbucks began its expansion outside of North America in 1996 when it opened two stores in Japan. By 2000, teamed up with its Canadian operation, it had opened 127 stores internationally. Its appetite for worldwide growth grew bigger in 2005 when it set its sights on 1,500 stores internationally, including expansions into Brazil, India, Russia and China.

Perhaps it’s coincidence that when Starbucks redesigned its Web site recently the “International” link was promoted to the top of the page, as shown here:

For Starbucks, this is big.

The previous two web designs, stretching all the way back to 2003, relegated the “Worldwide” link to the bottom of the left column.

Not an ideal location.

That said, now that Starbucks has promoted its international interface, there is still room for improvement.

For starters, the accented characters used in Österreich and España didn’t appear correctly on both my Mac and PC browsers. It looks like an Adobe Flash glitch, but a pretty big one I’d say.

Second, I’d like to see the “International” link accompanied with a globe or map icon. Would a non-native English speaker know to click on the International link? I’m not sure. A globe icon speaks many languages.

I’m glad to see Starbucks put an emphasis on International. It may seem like a trivial change in the great scheme of things, but I know how various departments and divisions within companies battle over the precious real estate of a global home page. Here’s hoping the International link retains its high-profile position.

I think it will. After all, international is where the growth is.

The one-line description on Amazon says:

Police detective Ronnie Craven investigates the killing of his own daughter and becomes embroiled in a vast conspiracy.

Edge of Darkness is a 1985 6-part British mini-series that is still unknown to most Americans.

For now.

I just found out that the series is being released this fall — finally — in DVD format.

My film professor Steve Geller introduced me to the drama back in the early 90s. And I ended up buying it on VHS. It’s the only reason I still cling to my VHS player after all these years.

The drama takes place in Thatcher-era Europe. The cold war is on, Reagan is in office, and the nuclear race is still very much a race.

Joe Don Baker — best known for his lead role in Walking Tall — plays an unforgettable role as a CIA agent.

Eric Clapton gets billing for co-creating the soundtrack — and there is no mistaking his guitar. But Edge of Darkness is best known for its use of Willie Nelson’s plaintive ballad Time of the Preacher.

Edge of Darkness is multi-layered, ambitious, and prescient.

I’ve read that Hollywood is remaking this series, with Mel Gibson taking over the role that Bob Peck immortalized. I’m not sure how you remake something that is already close to perfect, but if it draws attention to the original, it will be well worth it.

Edge of Darkness: The Complete BBC Series

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 18, 2009 Update: TED has reached 2,000 translations.

Now, putting aside my concerns about a company getting services for free that it could very well afford, I want to focus on what TED has done well with its web site to facilitate the crowdsourcing of translations:

• All translators have their own profile page (see below)
• Translators get little buttons they can use to promote themselves (see above)
• The translators who have done the most work are highlighted
• The most-translated talks are highlight (see below)

One of the most active translators is Yasser Bahjatt. I like how you can click on the talks that he has translated.

A picky comment: Why is Arabic in Latin script? Wouldn’t it make more sense to use Arabic script? Details, I know, but these details count when you’re trying to create content for people who may not understand any English.

Next, here is a screen shot of the most popular talks — at least among translators:

As TED adds more and more translated content, it’s going to need to devote resources to providing a fully localized user interface (UI).

Right now, TED offers this:

But for the most part, the TED site expects users to know a fair amount of English if they’re going to navigate to their translated content.

Ultimately, TED will have to localize its Web site — or just the Ted Talks section — so that people can more easily find their translated content. And this I suspect won’t come free.

Nevertheless, TED has proven that its content is translation-worthy and it has done a great job of creating a community of translators who are bound to keep the effort alive and growing.

I appears though that Google still has a thing or two to learn about scanning covers…

Four years later, the quest continues.

Unfortunately, as documented by the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks is now closing stores faster than Winter can visit them.

In 2005, Winter had visited 4,500 Starbucks stores. Today, his count stands at more than 9,000. And he is now racing to visit those stores scheduled to close, sometimes missing them by a matter of hours.

Winter is single (no surprise there) and lives at home with his parents, who wish he’d just give up this Sysiphean quest.

But I get a kick out of his quest. In this period in our history when so much seems ephemeral, so many trends little more than 15-minute Wharholian blips, it’s nice to see somebody out there, crazy as he may be, sticking with it.

“Pointless though it might it be,” says Winter, who plans to go to the U.K. next week, “a goal is a goal.”

ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish.

http://twitter.com/icann_en

http://twitter.com/icann_es

This is not the most scalable solution. And I’m not trying to pick on Twitter; the issue effects any multinational company or organization.

For instance, let’s say ICANN launches a Portuguese feed for Brazil. The address would have to read twitter.com/icann_pt_br. Similar challenges arise with French (Canada vs. France). And even the English and Spanish feeds are inherently going to exclude various flavors of the languages.

In addition, if I were wanting to be a pain, I could register icann_ru to beat ICANN to that address. And this highlights a larger emerging issue (and opportunity) as Twitter becomes more corporate and less personal — how to ensure that brand holders have access to their names. I always thought this would be a nice revenue source for Twitter, similar to the way that registries profit from domain registrations.

Ideally, Twitter would allow you to set up one address and then forward language-specific feeds to the subscriber based on their preference — sort of like how language negotiation works now with Web browsers. For instance, if I type in Google.com, the language I get aligns with the language preference of my browser.

But therein lies the challenge of Twitter — it doesn’t just send feeds to a browser. It sends the feeds to browsers and mobile devices and even Twitter apps, like Tweetie, which I use on occasion.

ICANN is now migrating its subscribers from icann_en to icann. No word yet on what will happen with icann_es.

What do you think Twitter should do to solve this issue?

That said, I do wonder how this article is going to be received by the translators of the world who actually expect to be paid for their services.

For example the for-profit, invite-only conference company TED saved about $500,000 using volunteer translators. Clearly TED could have coughed up the money.

I can see this article spurring on CEOs across the land to think that they too can get free translations.

One thing I mentioned awhile back is that you need to be translation-worthy to get away with pro-bono services, particularly if you’re a for-profit company.

Facebook, Google and, now, TED appear to be translation-worthy. But I wouldn’t expect to see, say, General Motors succeeding in this area (though they could certainly use the help).

But the larger issue here is to the extent that volunteer translation for companies that can afford to pay for translation undermines the translation industry. I don’t believe machine translation undermines human translation because companies generally use it to translation text they would never have hired people to do (or they use it as a first pass before bringing on the human translators).

But volunteer translation is different.

Are  volunteer translators taking money away from their colleagues? After all, TED and Google and Facebook certainly can afford to pay. Or are volunteer translators raising awareness for the value of their work, thereby benefiting the translation industry as a whole?

Personally, I think we’re entering a dangerous area where companies that don’t know better are going to think they don’t have to pay for translation. This all reminds me of Seinfeld’s George Costanza’s aversion to parking garages: Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?

I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000.

From my humble perch, I’d say web globalization is alive and well. Perhaps searches are going down because more and more people already know what it is — at least that’s how I choose to see it.

And while I’m wasting an evening on Google, here’s one of its newest features, the Wonder Wheel:

It’s nifty, though I’m not sure I would use it more than once. And what the heck is Walmart doing there?

Walmart failed in Germany and Korea and is still bleeding cash in Japan — not exactly what I would call a web globalization success story. Walmart finished in the bottom 10 of The Web Globalization Report Card.

In other Google news, I added Friend Connect to this site — up on the upper right corner. Apparently Google now offers real-time translation of comments, so I’m hoping to give it a spin.

Let me know what you think…

UPDATE: I just removed it. It was really slow in loading. Instead I inserted my Twitter feed. I just noticed that the Chinese characters that were supported just fine in Twitter didn’t make it across into my feed as Unicode. This is interesting because I have WordPress setup for Unicode. I’ll have to do some digging.

Maybe I should have titled this post The Rise and Fall of Wordpress Plugins.

81 of the Fortune 500

This is less than I would have guessed. As a comparison, roughly twice as many companies on the Inc. 500 list have blogs — and I would say this is because smaller companies have fewer lawyers to advise against hosting blogs. Or, it could simply be that smaller companies stand to gain more from blogs than large established brands.

Also interesting is that more of these Fortune 500 companies Twitter than blog.

This data is from a report by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, a professor and senior fellow at the Society for New Communications Research.

The report is free and you can download it here.

Key findings include:

• 81 of the Fortune 500 or 16% currently have public-facing blogs. This compares with 39 percent of the Inc. 500; 41 percent of the higher education sector and 57 percent of the nation’s Top 200 charities.
• 28 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to Twitter accounts. (Other Fortune 500 companies have Twitter accounts, but they are not linked to their blogs)
• Five of the top ten companies have public blogs: Wal-Mart, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, and Bank of America.
• 90 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs have the comments feature enabled.
• The computer software/hardware technology industry has the most blogs, followed by the food and drug industry, financial services,
• Internet services, semi-conductors, retail and automotive respectively.
• Ten percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to podcasts; 21 percent incorporate video

This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial.

Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an English-language sign using machine translation (MT) software and, apparently, the MT engine wasn’t working all that well.

So instead of “restaurant” we have “translate server error.”

It’s certainly one of the more memorable restaurant names I’ve come across. I’ll be sure to look out for it when I visit!

And I’ve love to know which MT engine delivered this message.

As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global.

Om Malik recently reported some key stats from Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.

I’m thrilled to announce that Eastern Washington University Press has just published a short story collection by my wife, Midge Raymond: Forgetting English.

Readers of this blog will certainly appreciate the title of one of Midge’s stories: “Translation Memory.” Midge is the only person I know who can turn an obscure translation term into great drama.

Many of the stories in this collection are award-winners in themselves, having been published in Indiana Review (“First Sunday” received the Indiana Review Prize for Fiction), new south (the title story, “Forgetting English,” received the magazine’s annual fiction award), Bellevue Literary Review, Ontario Review, Roanoke Review, and American Literary Review.

Clearly, I’m a fan of Midge’s writing, so I’ll let a more objective reviewer vouch for her work:

“When you forget English, you might learn to speak the forbidden language of your sister’s Tongan lover — you might find you understand the sweet murmur of the Gentoo and the ecstatic cry of Emperor Penguins. When the man you saved from the sea chooses the icy water a second time, you may bend to the universal posture of grief, recognizing the way your body echoes a bird’s in a wild communion of sorrow. Midge Raymond’s stories are a revelation and a delight, a journey from the frozen desert at the bottom of the world to the lush rainforest of Hawai’i. Prepare yourself to think in Chinese, to start over, to reveal your worst crime and discover you are a stranger to yourself, born again into a world where all things become wondrous and new, terrifying and possible.”
— Melanie Rae Thon, author of First, Body and Sweet Hearts

To download a story excerpt and learn more, visit www.midgeraymond.com.

This was not the first Web site I’ve encountered to offer an international English option — and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Now what does international English actually look like?

In most cases, it’s American English.

For those who prefer British English, this is not the greatest of trends. But it is a trend. And while Boingo makes it obvious through its language picker, there are many more companies who simply use American English as the default English across all English-speaking markets.

Siemens comes to mind. Not only does this German-based company use American English on its .com page, it also uses American English on its .co.uk page.

I can count on one hand the number of companies that pay to have English translated from American to British or vice versa. And in this financial climate, I may not even need that many fingers.

No.

In the years ahead there will be only one flavor of English on most corporate Web sites — just as there will be only one flavor of Spanish (and maybe even one flavor of French).

One day the media will pick up on this as another sign of the decline of the diversity of languages on this planet.

All I know is that companies are trying to communicate with as much of the world as possible while spending as little as money as possible. And even language is facing cutbacks these days.

And I knew then why he was singing. And I felt like singing too.

Tomorrow at noon a new era begins.

I’m sure this is an issue not unique to LaCie. The folks who manage the Web site generally sit in a different part of the company from the folks who develop the installation software. So the end result is two different user experiences — and inconsistent experiences at that.

First-time visitors to LaCie.com will encounter this splash global gateway:

I’m not a huge fan of the pull-down menu, but there are also text links positioned underneath the menu for those who’d rather not bother scrolling. Overall, it’s a nice way to welcome people to your Web site — by ensuring that they’ve found their localized content as early as possible in the process.

After purchasing my hard drive, I inserted the CD that shipped with it and this is the first screen I saw;

“ENU” was the folder I needed to open.

But I had to think about it. “English_US” would have been clearer. And what about the other options? Is CHS for Switzerland? Is NLD for the Netherlands? I would assume so, but I can’t imagine that I’m alone in having to think about this. And you really shouldn’t make your customers think about these details.

A simple splash screen — based on the Web design — would have been a much more user-friendly way to present these options.

I want to emphasize that this is a disconnect not unique to LaCie. It has to do with different groups within same company all tackling the same general problem — with different results.

My prediction is that the people who manage global Web sites are going to see their scope widen in the years ahead as they assist other customer-facing parts of the company develop consistent global interfaces. It’s all about consistency these days — easier said than done — but those who do it well truly stand apart.