But what made the system worth mentioning here was what I saw when the system activated…

A global gateway, shown here:

Global gateways, those little landing pages that ask you to select your country or language (or both, aren’t just limited to Web pages these days. Every screen is bound to feature one.

As more software is designed to be global from day one, we’ll see more of these screens.

And as global gateways go, this one was pretty good. The 15 languages were in the native script and there were no extraneous visual elements. The screen had just one purpose and one purpose only, which you don’t always find with global gateways. Some companies thrown marketing elements that actually diminish the usability of these screens.

One problem with this gateway was the fact that my language preference wasn’t captured for the duration of the flight. As I learned how to the use the interface I had to re-select my language a few times.

But what I found very interesting was that there were mini-gateways used for selected movies, as shown here:

In this case, the movie was available in several languages and I could choose which one, while still maintaining my English-language interface. I’m not sure how many people would choose a different language than their interface language, but it was still interesting to see what translation investments the studios had made on various films.

I would love to collect screen shots from other in-flight entertainment systems, to see how United’s system stacks up. If you’ve got any to share, please emal them to me.

Oh, and I started work at Microsoft as a program manager on the Global Product Development team in Global Foundation Services. The people here are passionate about Web globalization, which is what I’m going to be focused on.

Now, I should insert a disclaimer here: This is my personal blog and in no way related to my work for Microsoft. If I do blog about the company in the months ahead, it’s going to be my two cents only, and it will only be about publicly known products and developments.

I do plan to continue this blog. I have a backlog of Web globalization topics to publish and hopefully I’ll find some spare moments soon.

As for Byte Level Research — needless to say, I will not offering consulting services, and I have removed our “Services” section from the site. But my partner, Midge Raymond, will keep the company moving. She has some product ideas for the year ahead as well.

For a country of 65 million people, 100,000 registrations is still a drop in the bucket.

Compare that with the UK, a country with 60 million people and 6 million .uk registrations. Nevertheless, you gotta start somewhere, and I’m glad to see Iran slowly becoming a more visible part of the Internet.

It’s also worth noting that many Iranian sites use the .com address and many non-Iranian companies have registered .ir, such as Sony, located at www.sony.co.ir.

In the old days of journalism, the only people who saw press releases were journalists. They arrived by mail or fax and their purpose was fairly straightforward — to find their way into news articles. In smaller papers, sometimes these releases were reprinted as is.

But now that companies post press releases on their Web sites, these releases have come to serve many different audiences and many different purposes.

It turns out that getting news media attention is not the number one goal of an online press release.

The abstract from this study is now online. You can download it here.

To give you an idea of just how aggressive Google has been in this area, here is a screen grab of Google Translate from 2006:

And here is one from today:

That’s roughly twice the number of languages in two years.

Microsoft has also been busy over the past year. Like Google, it now supports machine translation using its own in-house engine.

And it also offers a handy Web translation widget that you can insert into your Web page to allows users to self-translate your site into their language.

The portfolio of languages is still on the light side, but like I’ve mentioned before, these types of developments illustrate that machine translation (despite its inherent limitations) is becoming a critical piece of the Web globalization puzzle.

UPDATE: Here’s an interview with Google MT researcher Franz Och.

Inspired by our Country Codes of the World map, I developed a smaller version that includes the ccTLDs currently in use by Google for its local search engines.

As you can see here, Google has quite a few ccTLDs in use — more than 160, including Andorra, Kenya, Ukraine, and Ghana.

Why did I pick Google?

Because I know of no other company that hosts localized Web sites across so many different country codes. These may only be search engine interfaces, but they are still significant. While plenty of multinationals have registered hundreds of ccTLDs, few have put them to use so extensively.

And Google has room to grow — there are more than 250 ccTLDs available.

It’s also worth noting that Google redirects visitors to its .US domain to .COM, which I think is short-sighted. As I’ve written before, .COM is not synonymous with USA.

I have a few other companies in mind for this visual treatment. I’ll keep you posted.

This map is free and you can download a PDF here.

The post I wrote on the Google Translation Center has been the most-visited page on this blog over the past month. Clearly, Google has struck a nerve in the translation industry — and its service is not even live yet.

The Translation Automation User Society does not appear to be as welcoming as I am of the Google Translation Center. A new essay on its site says:

Private companies will always seek world domination and customer lock-in. As a professional in the translation industry, the Google Translation Centre may help you on the short-term, but you only help Google long-term and you don’t help the world at all. Ultimately we pay the price for putting all translated words and sentences in the possession of a single company.

There is a distinct “evil empire” tone to this essay, which is understandable to a point. Google appears to be entering that evil empire stage of its development. Though I still use the search engine.

And the last I checked, Google’s “terms and services” page for the Translation Center had been taken down. So I can’t really say what Google’s policy will be regarding the translation memory (TM) that it may or may not leverage from this Center.

But it is no coincidence that TAUS is planning to develop a massive database of TMs of its own. I’m sure it wants readers to come away thinking that TAUS is going to be far more open with its TMs than Google will be.

TAUS says that its TM database will be free to the world for the looking up of translations of terms and phrases. But you’ll have to be a member to actually have access to the database (on a reciprocal basis) and membership is not free. I’m confident that this database will be of the highest quality as TAUS has some impressive corporate members, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle (Google does not appear to be a member).

Personally, I’m glad to see both services emerging — as well as services from Asia Online and Language Weaver (which is now offering a Web-based SaaS translation service). We are entering uncharted waters and it’s important to have a mix of large and small players, as well as a nonprofit, to keep everyone on their toes.

Is there a risk to the world if Google owns the world’s largest TM (which it might have already accomplished)?

Perhaps.

TAUS raises important questions. The answers have yet to emerge.

But there is a different type of gateway out there that is worth mentioning — a gateway unique to the Web sites of alcoholic beverages: the age gateway.

Here is the age gateway of Budweiser:

The age gateway has to be one of the most useless gateways ever devised — and certainly one of the most frustrating to use.

For starters, every beer maker seems to have its own take on how best to design the gateway. The gateways are usually Flash-based and typically difficult to use. What I end up doing is simply entering 01/01/1971 just to get through it as quickly as possible.

I would predict that the logs of Budweiser feature an inordinately high number of people born on the first day of the year.

But the reason why I’m mentioning the age gateway here is two-fold. In the case of Budweiser (and most competitive Web sites), the age gateway comes before the global gateway.

Once you get past the “virtual bouncer” and into the Budweiser site, in order to find your specific country or language Web site, you must do a bit of searching. Here is the buried link:

This link takes you to this page:

According to Budweiser, “great taste knows no boundaries.” But great global design apparently does run up against a few boundaries. For a non-English speaker, getting to this gateway is no trivial task.

What’s the lesson here?

Don’t place the age gateway before the global gateway.

Let the Web user find his or her localized Web site before you present your virtual bouncer. This is particularly important because dates are not presented in the same format in all countries. By directing the user to his or her local site first, you can then present your age gateway in the correct date format.

And, as my brother pointed out, different countries have different drinking ages — yet another reason to put the global gateway before the age gateway.

Now for the second point I wanted to make regarding age gateways.

Not long ago I came across a new product known as the Beertender. It’s a sort of mini-keg fridge designed specifically for Heineken.

Take a moment to visit www.beertender.com and you’ll first encounter this splash global gateway:

It is not until you select a country that you arrive at an age gateway.To my knowledge, Heineken is the first company to place its global gateway ahead of the age gateway!

If you select the French site, you’ll arrive at a very simple yes/no age gateway:

But because American lawyers are not as freewheeling as the French in regards to underage drinking, here is the American age gateway:

But even here you’ll find that Beertender makes significant usability improvements. Instead of asking the user to input dates, you simply select the dates displayed on the screen. It’s remarkably faster to get through.

So it’s nice to see Beertender not only put its global gateway ahead of its age gateway, but also support localized and user-friendly age gateways. I hope the other beer makers of the world take notice.

Here’s a screen grab of the figures I want to focus on:

What makes this chart so interesting are the growth rates — .com is growing at 5% and .cn is growing at 18%. Granted, it’s easier to grow at 18% when you’ve only got 12 million registrations, compared with growing at 5% when you’ve got 76 million registrations.

But growth is growth and .cn is clearly on a roll.

And China has a lot of headroom for growth in terms of Web users and potential domain registrants. I am confident that .cn will reach 50 million registrations over the next 3 years.

At about that point in time, .com should be around 100 million registrants — in no danger of losing its number one status.

However, if the rate of growth of .com registrations were to decrease while .cn rate of growth continues to increase, it’s reasonable to wonder if we will one day see the number of .cn registrations surpass .com registrations?

I realize this is a far-fetched scenario.

After all, it’s reasonable to assume that companies that register .cn may also register .com — and the majority do just that.

But it’s certainly something to contemplate. And even if .cn never comes close to surpassing .com, the overall point I’d like to emphasize here is that .cn is now the world’s second most popular domain extention — and likely to remain that way for many years.

What do you think?

Web form usability expert Luke Wroblewski provides a very handy article on the challenges of developing Web input forms that work in various countries.

Data input and output is where Web localization projects often sink or swim. And Web forms can give a global marketing director night sweats.

Luke stresses that if you can identify the user’s country before presenting the form, you’re in much better shape, because you can then provide a fully localized form. And this is why global navigation is so incredibly important to successful Web localization. If you can help your customer find his or her country Web site right from the start, everything else gets so much easier (for you and your customer).

Here’s the article.

But it was interesting to come across this copy of Newsweek magazine from 1979:

Here are before and after shots of the language gateway.

August 6th:

August 14th:

What I find interesting is that these two languages were either added right when the Olympics began or possibly even a few days later.

I remain a big proponent of using ccTLDs. After all, Google is not the leading search engine in all countries, particularly China and Russia.

I’d love to see Google do more in helping Webmasters understand how to manage content across multiple country Web sites. There is great concern over hosting duplicate content (which Google penalizes) and continued questions about managing multiple languages within a specific country.

(thx to my brother for the heads up on this post)

My biggest concern is slow-loading Web pages. And, yes, I know the quality of the translation will leave plenty to be desired, but what I really like about the widget are the little RSS feed buttons. Just click the button and you can have translated feeds delivered to whatever feed reader you use.

What I don’t understand is the significance of the name “mloovi.” Am I missing something?

But here comes Google…

According to Blogoscoped, Google is about to launch the Google Translation Center.

This is an exciting development, though I don’t expect everyone to suddenly ditch ProZ for Google. Why? Because much of the appeal of ProZ is the community, which Google does not appear to be trying to support. Still, freelancers will certainly want to investigate this potential new resource.

I’ve called out ProZ as one company under threat from Google Translation Center. But EVERY translation agency needs to keep a close eye on this service. It could be a threat. It could also end up being something translation agencies use themselves — instead of paid platforms from SDL. Naturally, for this to happen this new platform has a lot of evolving to do. Still, I can’t help but wonder.

There is no mention of whether or not Google will support machine translation and/or translation memory. I’m assuming they will.

I have LOTS of questions and this service isn’t even live yet. So we shall see what happens. But this is big news, no question.

I wrote awhile back, that the translation industry as we know it is over. The technologists have taken over and they’re bringing brute force computing and massive networks to the table to reduce costs and increase time to market. This is just another sign of this macro trend.

What do you think? Is Google going to disrupt the translation industry or is this new platform going to fall flat?

(Thx Chris for the heads up!)

Update: I just read an insightful article on this Google’s service at GigaOm…

That’s what I can’t help but wonder when I read that Kosovo has requested its own country code domain.

Serbia (and it’s powerful backer Russia) do not accept Kosovo’s independence and are not going to be happy if Kosovo does get its own ccTLD. But ICANN may very well issue one if Kosovo meets certain criteria in the months ahead.

Keep in mind, you do not have to be a country in every sense of the word to have a country code. Antarctica (.aq) has one. So does Bouvet Island (.bv) — an uninhabited piece of land in the Atlantic.

I’ve got about a hundred copies of this map remaining and I’m offering them for $3 each for orders of 25 or $2 each for orders of 50 (plus postage).

The map normally sells for $12 each, so this is a nice discount — and a great way to get your whole office a copy of this useful map.

Here are more details of the map:
http://bytelevel.com/map/map_of_WWW.html

Please note that this is a smaller version of the poster now being sold. It is designed to fit on a cubicle wall and displays 180 ccTLDs.

If you’re interested in purchasing, please contact me.

United States

220 million Internet users

70% penetration

China

253 million Internet users

19% penetration

For readers of this blog, this development is hardly news. But it’s significant nonetheless. After all, the US isn’t exactly going to catch back up in this regard. China wins the numbers game, at least when it comes to people.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from the article:

Baidu, for instance, said on Thursday that its second-quarter net profit had jumped 81 percent. During that period, Baidu had a 63 percent share of China’s search engine market, while Google had about 26 percent, with Yahoo trailing far behind, according to iResearch, a market research firm based in Beijing.

Tencent, a popular site for social networking and gaming, now has a stock market value of $15 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies. In comparison, Amazon.com is valued at about $30 billion.

China also leads in having the world’s most popular country code (.cn).

Here is a graph they published of the rate of growth of their language support. It’s a very impressive visual, but I found it potentially misleading.

What is being displayed is not the total number of “unique” languages Google supports, just the total number of product/language combinations. And that’s an important detail.

Google is nowhere near supporting 1,400 different languages. Their search engine interface, which supports roughly 120 languages, represents the maximum number of languages the company supports. And this number has only increased by about 10 languages over the past two years.

The other Google applications appear to have peaked (for now) at between 40 and 43 languages.

To support 40 languages is remarkable. Based on my survey of 225 global Web sites in the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, fewer than 10 companies support 40 or more languages (English excluded).

Still, it looks as if Google is now focused on getting its increasingly wide selection of software up to the 40-language mark rather than aggressively pushing into brand new languages. Gmail, for instance, now appears to be adding a language or two per year — rather than 10 to 20, which is the pace we’ve been seeing with YouTube and Blogger.

As a result of the worldwide success of Facebook’s translation system, the company has opened up the Translation Application to any developer using Facebook Platform. Beginning today, any Facebook developer can make their application available in any of the 20 languages that are currently available on Facebook, with 69 more coming soon.

Developers can now access the Translation Application to either translate their applications themselves, or open up translation of their application to Facebook users around the world, who will work together to define it in their native languages.

Developers are naturally very excited about this development because they can tap into the same group of enthusiastic volunteers who are currently translating Facebook’s interface into different languages. Or, developers can pay translators or agencies to do the translation.

Facebook knows that part of the value of its platform are the third-party applications. As I mentioned a few days ago, I was concerned that so many of Apple’s iPhone apps are currently in English only. And it’s safe to say that Apple is nowhere close to launching anything similar to what Facebook is now doing.

As Facebook goes global with its platform, it wants all of its 400,000 developers (more than half of which live outside of the US) to come along as well. Opening up the translation platform is a win-win for everyone.

And we could see Facebook’s translation platform become a force onto itself.

It will be interesting to see what role translation agencies and freelance translators will play. I see a nice opportunity, because some of these app developers will want to pay a premium to have professional translators involved.

PS: Techcrunch also shares some data on Facebook’s global traffic growth — a sign that this translation program is perfectly timed.

GoDaddy, the US registrar with rights to the much-hyped .me ccTLD, opened registration to the general public today and it looks like things have not gone all that smoothly.

TechCrunch reports that people received credit charges for domains they in fact did not successfully register. Apparently GoDaddy had server/load issues.

But if you want to register DomainUnavailable.me, the last I checked it was still available!

So after a slow start upgrading to the iPhone 2.0 OS on Friday, I’ve since had a chance to review a number of the apps and have been very impressed so far (though a few did cause the iPhone to crash).

As I reviewed the Apps in the iTunes store I began to notice that they were available only in English. Here is a screen grab from the AOL IM app:

Just to be sure about this, I also visited iTunes Spain and looked up the same AOL IM App. And as you see here, it is available only in English:

As far as I can tell, the only iPhone App currently available in a language other than English is Apple’s own Remote App, available in these languages:

I know it’s early yet. But keep in mind that the iPhone launched globally on Friday, which means there are a lot of markets that have a localized iPhone but only one fully localized iPhone App to use on them.

This means there is a HUGE opportunity for the software localization vendors of the world to help these software developers take these apps global. Apple says it sold one million iPhones over the past three days — and 10 million apps.

Here are some of the companies that currently offer non-localized apps: eBay, MySpace, Bloomberg, Travelocity, MLB.com, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.

If you spot any iPhone Apps that have been localized outside of English, please let me know. This will be very interesting to follow…

UPDATE: Adam Houser just alerted me to  Anime Match by Jirbo, shown here:

This app is available in Japanese. It’s a catchy little game actually — and free!

I have the old iPhone and tried to upgrade this morning. Apparently I’m one of many thousands of people (or more) who have received nothing but error messages. Here is one of them:

Apple had to know the strain to its servers would be huge this morning. Why the company decided to roll out its new 3G iPhone while also upgrading all current iPhone software on the same day is beyond me. They should have handled the upgrade a day early to better distribute server loads globally.

It will be interesting to see if Apple steps up and admits its mistake or just ignores its growing global user base. This is a critical point in Apple’s evolution and it would be nice to see the company get more customer friendly, though I’m not holding my breath.

UPDATE: Well, it’s two hours later and I have another error screen to add to my collection:

Based on what I’m hearing from others, there are two main errors: -4 and -9838. Both appear related to some bug or some traffic issue with the iTunes servers. I was finally able to upgrade to the 2.0 OS, and it seems to be working fine, but I just can’t sync to iTunes.

Still no official word anywhere on the Apple Web site that there is a problem. Companies are judged not just by their successes but also by how they handle their mistakes. Apple is losing big points today.

SUCCESS! About seven hours after I began the upgrade process my iPhone is now officially upgraded. I just took a stab at using Facebook and Twitterific. With each new app this phone — despite my earlier grumblings — is just going to get more and more valuable.

Here are the details:

Web Globalization Trends to Watch
Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT

To register, click here.

And if you can’t make the call, it will be recorded for playback.

Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today.

This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent flaw in hosting an American visual at Google.com: The .com address is not synonymous with USA.

I know, it’s a picky thing. And yet it’s not such a picky thing. I work with numerous multinationals that now host their American Web sites at the .us domain — and their global Web sites at the .com domain. This makes perfect sense.

And yet Google, in applying the American visual to the .com site, perpetuates this idea that .com is a uniquely American URL.

Granted, Google doesn’t show residents of France and Germany and other countries this visual even if they input Google.com; Google uses geolocation to serve up localized Web pages based on the Web user’s location.

I understand Google has a dilemma on its hands. Because most Americans believe .com to be an American domain, Google might appear unpatriotic if it didn’t continue this .com/4th of July tradition.

But what I would like to see happen is Google launching a .us search engine. Not only would Google benefit from having another country country code to monetize, but those multinationals that currently host .us Web sites would be rewarded for their efforts.

gTLDs are those domains to the right of the dot in the URL, such as .com and .biz. Currently there are 21 gTLDs. But going forward, there is no limit to the number of gTLDs that can be registered. A company could register one, a city could register one, even an individual.

The media are predicting a bewildering array of new gTLDs in the months ahead.

But I’m not so sure we’ll see such a domain land rush. For starters, the process and costs of getting approval for a new gTLD are going to eliminate only the most passionate (and well-funded) supporters.

In the near future, I do see domains such as .berlin (and other cities) and .sport (and other topical words) emerging.

The big question will be to what extent the corporate world participates in registering gTLDs. Will we see a .coke or .pepsi or .google emerge? Odds are pretty good that we’ll see a .google simply because Google can actually manage its domain fairly well. As for Coke or Pepsi, I’m not so sure. Which leads us to the need for third-party domain service providers who could help companies like Coke and Pepsi register and manage their gTLDs. I sense a nice business opportunity ahead.

The larger issue to emerge out of the recent ICANN meeting is the coming of IDNs, such as domain names in Cyrillic and Chinese. When the leaders of both China and Russia clamor for their own native-language URLs, you can be sure that they will become a reality. This too will be a messy process, but it is safe to see we will see non-Latin URLs in 2009.

Here are two articles that provide a good analysis of ICANN’s recent announcements: InformationWeek and CircleID.

Being the globalization geek that I am, I couldn’t help but check out the home page of Yahoo! Spain, which features a localized header, shown here:

And then I noticed that the home page of Yahoo! Germany was also localized for the home team.

So who the heck was Yahoo! rooting for?

Everyone, it seems.

Which highlights a delicate issue for multinational Web sites — that of not appearing to root for one country over another. The golden rule of course is to simply treat each country equally. This is easy to do when it comes to localizing headers, but not so easy when it comes to providing equal levels of customer support, product documentation, and so on.

Yahoo! is not alone in navigating these waters. Here is Google Germany:

Interestingly, you can’t view this German page by simply entering google.de. You need to use a German-based IP proxy.

And now here’s my second Web globalization thought: Why does the Euro 2008 Web site support vastly more languages than the Beijing Olympics Web site?

Here is the Euro site, with support for 9 languages.

And here is the Olympics site, with support for just English, French, and Chinese.

I find it ironic that an event that is billed as a global event supports fewer languages than an event that has Euro in its title. Euro 2008 even supports Japanese, Chinese, and Korean even though these countries don’t have participating teams.

I realize that the Olympic Charter specifies just two official languages: English and French. And the host country generally adds its local language to the mix as well. This rule makes sense for signage, announcements, etc. But I don’t see why the Web site should support only three languages.

The argument can be made by the Olympics that they simply cannot justify financially supporting every language of every participating country. But I still don’t buy it. If Euro2008 can support 9 languages, the Olympics can and should do better than three.

If you’re curious about how the map came to be — as well as what areas of the world .me, .bv, and .aq refer to, you can listen to the interview here.

PS: Simon is based in .au.