Global by Design

Smashing Magazine has an entertaining piece on the Unusable and Superficial World of Beer and Alcohol Websites.
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 [...]

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It’s not every day I come across a survey localized into 18 languages.
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 [...]

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For a Westerner like myself, the most-popular Korean portals Naver and Daum are a maze of text and images. The pages are too busy, too distracting.
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 [...]

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Nominet, the UK registrar, published the results of a poll that found:
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 [...]

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A global gateway doesn’t have to be fancy. In fact, it shouldn’t be fancy.
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 [...]

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The Visit Korea tourism web site offers up a global gateway that’s difficult to ignore:

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.

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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 [...]

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I was contacted recently about a rather interesting and specialized job opening in the globalization space. So I thought I’d throw it open to the readers of this blog.
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 [...]

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It’s been awhile since I’ve written about global gateways – those landing pages and header elements that companies use to direct visitors to localized web sites.
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 [...]

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Starbucks may be closing stores in the US, but it’s still growing internationally.
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, [...]

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