Ethan has provided me with a mid-point summary of results, which I’ve included below. I was surprised to find that Microsoft and Babelfish are beating Google on some languages pairs, as well as on shorter text strings. Although Google is emerging the overall winner — and receiving some much-deserved attention from the media — it’s nice to see some healthy competition.

That said, quality is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece — perhaps much more important — is usability. Now that Google has embedded its MT engine into Gmail and Reader — and now its Chrome client –I find I’m using Google exclusively as my MT engine.

Here are Ethan’s findings so far (emphasis mine):

At the highest level, it appears that survey participants prefer Google Translate’s results across the board.

In a few languages (Arabic, Polish, Dutch) the preference is overwhelming with votes for Google doubling its nearest competitor

However, once you remove voters that have self defined their fluency in the source or target language as “limited,” the contest becomes closer along some of the heavily trafficked languages. For example:

• Microsoft Bing Translator leads in German
• Yahoo! Babelfish leads in Chinese
• Google maintains its lead in Spanish, Japanese, and French

Observing only the self-defined “limited fluency” voter reveals a strong brand bias. If your fluency in the target translation language is limited, it would stand to reason your ability to assess the quality of the translation is very limited. And yet…

• Limited-fluency voters chose Google over Bing by 2 to 1
• They also chose Google over Yahoo! Babelfish by 5 to 1

As I had guessed, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s hybrid rules-based MT model performed better on shorter text passages

For phrases below 50 characters, Google’s lead in Spanish, Japanese, and French disappear. And Microsoft’s lead in German widens.

Beyond 50 characters, Google’s relative performance seems to improve across the board.

For passages that are only one sentence, the same effect is seen, though to a lesser extent than under 50 characters.

On March 4th, we made a few changes to our survey – hiding the brands and randomizing the positions of the text results before voting.  Since then, we have not yet collected enough data to draw conclusions, but Babelfish seems to be receiving the biggest boost, perhaps showing the effects of the recent neglect of that tool.

Clearly, Ethan needs more data to arrive at more concrete conclusions. If you’re a translator and you want to lend a hand, here is the voting site.

PS: Here’s an interview with Google’s MT guru Franz Josef Och.

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

In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization.

Oddly missing from that list was China’s IDN.

One of the reasons ICANN initiated a fast-track process — if not the reason — was China.

China began putting pressure on ICANN a few years back by registering second-level IDNs and hinting that it would offer full-length IDNs if ICANN didn’t get moving. China’s Internet is essentially an intranet after all, so there is no reason the country couldn’t resolve full-length IDNs next week if it wanted.

Perhaps China’s IDN has already been approved ICANN has simply not gotten around to announcing it.

Still, I find the silence curious. Which is why I was interested to read that the president of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, traveled to China recently.

This article posits that China’s IDN application was one of the issues behind his trip.

What do you think? Is China’s IDN being used as leverage by ICANN?

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.

Here’s the video. It’s a great introduction to how ICANN has evolved and where it’s headed. And, yes, Rod does talk about my favorite topic: IDNs!

• Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
• Egypt (EG): مصر
• United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
• Russian Federation (RU): рф

Yesterday, Bangladesh announced that it too had applied. Here is the domain the government selected:

• বাংলা

There are 300 million Bangla speakers around the world who will potentially benefit from this domain.

To be clear, this domain has not yet received string approval from ICANN (the first four domains have been approved).

Here is the article that shows the prime minister of Bangladesh filing the application online. Yes, online, and no doubt after typing in an ASCII URL.

A year from now there will be full-length Bangla URLs.

This is getting interesting!

PS: If you’re seeing empty boxes above instead of Bangla characters, you don’t have the necessary font installed. This is one of the glaring differences between Windows and Mac. Below is a screen grab that shows Firefox on Mac on the left and IE8 on Windows 7 on the right.

But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, but this is only based on anecdotal feedback and personal experience.

Years ago, IBM developed an algorithmic method of measuring MT quality known as the BLEU score. Google scored well here, but the BLEU score is not without its critics.

Translation, like writing itself, is as much an art as it is a science.

Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines. And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Enter Ethan Shen and his start-up venture Gabble On.

Ethan has set out to recruit a few thousand volunteer translators to compare the three free translation engines. He asked me to help get out the word. He promises that he will publish the results for all to see. He’s also offering a free Apple iPad to one lucky volunteer. I have no financial interest in the project. I’m just curious to see what engine comes out on top.

Here are the details from Ethan:

We are seeking functional to fluent speakers of any two languages to take 5 minutes to judge and submit their opinion in our dynamic comparison engine (until March 29, 2010). At the end of the 6 week voting period, we will be publishing our results publicly in hopes that our research can to contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge in this field.

In gratitude for your participation, we are awarding one new Apple iPad to a lucky participant. The survey can be found at: www.gabble-on.com/SurveySelector.aspx.

Which engine do you think is best?

That said, a week ago Facebook began rolling out a new design that includes what I believe to be a global design flaw — one that I hope is reversed in the months ahead.

Now, if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you’ll probably know what I’m talking about when you look at this screen shot from Facebook’s new header:

The globe icon is supposed to indicate “Notifications.”

Globe icon = Notifications?

Perhaps Facebook is trying to extend the concept of “news” which has long been associated with the globe, mostly in the analog world. I live near the Seattle PI news building, which features a rather large globe on the roof:

So I fully understand what Facebook is aiming for.

But in the virtual world, the globe is more often than not associated with language or regional settings, or both. I can pull up a list of more than two dozen web sites that use a globe icon for this purpose — including Apple, Panasonic, Xbox, Autodesk, and E*TRADE.

So I find it troublesome to see such a popular web site using the globe icon for something other than language or location, particularly when there are other icons out there that could have just as easily stood in for “notification.” Like one of these perhaps:

What really is odd is that if you happen to have the translations application activated on Facebook, as I do, you can have two globe icons displayed on the same page — one in the header and one in the footer — both signifying something entirely different.

I’ll admit that I’m more than a little biased here. I’ve been a vocal proponent of using the globe icon for global navigation for nearly a decade. And I’ve worked with companies who have used this icon (or a map icon) and seen a measurable increases in global usability. Over the years, more and more companies have followed along, making this icon even more usable for more people.

What Facebook is doing is not only potentially confusing a segment of users who may expect the globe to be associated with language, but also preventing itself from ever creating a global gateway strategy that leverages the globe icon.

The good news of course is that Facebook seems to redesign its site every few months. So it’s quite likely this little icon will be “tweaked” as well. I’m certainly hoping so.

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.

In response to the earthquake in Haiti, Microsoft quickly expanded its machine translation engine to include Haitian Creole.

Today I noticed that Google has an alpha version of its Haitian Creole engine as well.

Though it’s sad that it took a natural disaster to spur attention to a particular language, I’m glad to see the language available.

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of readily accessible machine translation. Just as search engines help us better understand the world, machine translation engines help us better understand one another.

And, yes, they’re far from perfect. But they’re far better than nothing at all. And they are finding their way into countless applications and countless fixed and mobile devices, each additional language offering another glimpse into another world.

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.

Here they are:

• Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
• Egypt (EG): مصر
• United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
• Russian Federation (RU): рф

I’m surprised to see China absent from this list. But there are 12 other requests behind these four.

I know it’s way too early to start predicting the rise of the Arabic-language Internet, but it’s exciting to see such interest in the Middle East.

Here’s the ICANN press release.

Long before Google launched Google.cn, it launched the Chinese localized version of Google.com.

And this site is alive and well and hosted outside of China’s great firewall.

Just change your browser’s language preference to Chinese and you’ll see it the next time you visit Google.

And had China not continually blocked this site from Chinese citizens years ago, perhaps Google would not have compromised so to enter the market.

But it did. Its services got blocked anyway. And Baidu is still number one.

Here’s a good article that posits that Google’s Korea strategy is what led to what is happening right now with China.

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.

If you want to know the world’s most dangersous ccTLDs, ask an anti-virus software company.

McAfee has released its list of most dangerous country codes. Here are the top five:

1. Cameroon (.cm)
2. PR of China (.cn)
3. Samoa (.ws)
4. Philippines (.ph)
5. Former Soviet Union (.su)

Why is Camerooon at the top of the list?

Because .cm is a common typo by users who intended to type .com.

According to McAfee, more than 30% of all domains registered under .cm are up to no good.

I have a business idea for Verisign — why not license .cm and bundle it with .com registrations to give users a more secure domain package. I could see many companies paying for this.

China is number two. The country has made efforts recently to clean up its domain by requiring business licenses of its registrants. Some of the Western media have misinterpreted this as censorship. That’s one of the great ironies of managing top-level domains. You kinda have to keep a close eye on what the registrants are doing with these domains if you want to ensure a safer Internet.

But I digress.

And what are the safest ccTLDs? Here are the top five:

1. Japan (.jp)
2. Ireland (.ie)
3. Croatia (.hr)
4. Luxembourg (.lu)
5. Vanuatu (.vu)

You can view a larger map here.

Along the way, I discovered a rather interesting bug.

It’s not a huge deal, but a bug nonetheless. And one likely to cause a fair amount of confusion.

First of all, if you have never modified your language settings (The “International” button on the System Preferences menu)  then you won’t hit this bug.

If, however, you have made some changes to your language settings, read on…

Here is what my International settings menu looked like before the upgrade:

You’ll notice that I have U.S. English at the top of the list, followed by Japanese, followed by a “neutral” English. Normally, U.S. English would be followed by neutral English, which is the source of the bug.

When I began upgrading to Snow Leopard, I was presented with the usual legalese page — except that this one was in Japanese:

Apparently, Apple ignored my U.S. English setting and figured I had my computer set up for Japanese, hence the Japanese text.

To fix this, I simply bumped up the neutral English language setting ahead of Japanese.

NOTE: The same bug will appear if you have British English at the top of the list followed by a language other than English.

UPDATE: This bug may also impact the results of Spotlight as well. That is, you could see results in Japanese mixed with English. I haven’t been able to repro it myself but have encountered a few blog posts related to this issue.

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…

Here it is in Spanish…

And Chinese…

And, my favorite, “pirate English”…

Thanks largely to volunteer translators, Facebook has localized from one to 70 languages in two years. (Personally, I think we need more of the goofy ones — I’d so much rather “Adjust me riggins” than “Change settings” or change the “Settins o’ me piracy” than my “Privacy Settings.” I’m thinking of volunteering to do “Snarky English” myself.)

If you’re a translator, there’s a link on Facebook (on the language setting page) where you can find out more. And if you’re interested in more where this came from, check out our new report, coming in 2010.

Call it a Facebreak.

Facebook is all about scale.

Hundreds of millions of users.

And 10 billion minutes spent on Facebook each day.

But for us Facebook users, time does not scale.

Every minute we spend on Facebook is one minute less we spend reading a book, watching TV, sleeping, working.

It used to be that the Internet was all about saving time.

Amazon freed us from driving to the mall.

Online bill pay freed us from writing checks and searching for stamps.

And then along came Facebook and all those minutes saved were quickly reallocated.

I’m exaggerating, of course.

But I think “free” online applications in the years ahead are going to be viewed as not quite so free as in years past.

Time is money, after all. And we only have so much of it to spend.

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).

Google now has goo.gl.

And Facebook has FB.me.

But Google’s URL jumps out at me because it marks the first instance of Greenland (.gl) being used as a “countryless country code”

That is, the ccTLD is not being used to signify location, but for something totally unrelated.

I’ve compiled a growing list of Countryless Country Codes.

As always, if you have any sites for me to add, post a comment below.

London-based Today Translations is doing just that — offering a Name Audit Service for soon-to-be parents.

Do you think Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes would have chosen Suri for their daughter had they known it meant “pickpocket” in Japanese?

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

According to the agency’s web site:

Name changes later in life can be embarrassing, expensive and riddled with hassle. That’s why we offer a Name Translation Audit designed to help you consider the multilingual implications of giving your baby an unusual name.

For just £1,000, our brilliant team of 2600 linguists will check the meaning of baby names in 100 languages. Better safe than Suri.

Isn’t your baby worth it?

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.

And TED, which has been using the crowd to provide translation of its videos, is looking for a few more participants. Here’s a recent blog posting:

Wanted: Translators
The goal of TED’s Open Translation Project is to bring ideas worth spreading to the wider world by offering TEDTalks with subtitles in as many languages as possible. Still, many of the world’s languages aren’t yet represented in the project, and we want to fill those gaps. Today, we’re putting out a call to translators worldwide to help us translate the languages that the project hasn’t yet covered.

We’re looking for translators who speak these languages, in particular:

• Akan
• Assamese
• Filipino
• Galician
• Gujarati
• Icelandic
• Khmer
• Maltese
• Marathi
• Mongolian
• Nepali
• Panjabi
• Sinhala
• Tagalog
• Tibetan
• Tswana
• Yoruba
• Zulu

In some cases, translations in the languages above have already been completed, but remain unpublished because they still need to be reviewed. (Some of the languages only have one translator.)

These languages aren’t exactly what the translation industry would call Tier 1. That is, there simply isn’t as deep pool of translators to draw from. Which is why any crowdsourcing strategy must take into account the size of the potential crowd.

So how is TED doing so far with its crowdsourcing project?

This menu should give you an idea of what languages are covered and to what extent. Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese are doing best by far.

For roughly six months of work, TED appears to be doing quite well.

According to ICANN, 10 applications (representing five languages) were submitted over the first four days.

ICANN won’t announce exactly who applied and for what until each application is successful — which pushes us well into 2010.

So I’ve had to turn to press reports from the registries to piece together the data.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Egypt (Was the first country to apply)
• Saudi Arabia
• UAE
• Russia
• China
• Bulgaria
• Israel

Unless a country made more than one application (which I don’t believe is allowed under fast track protocol) I’m still missing three countries. I’m guessing there could be one or more additional Middle East countries. And perhaps Taiwan.

What do you think? What countries/languages am I missing?

I’m pleased to announce a new country codes map, this one devoted to the 27 members of the European Union.

The ccTLDs are sized according to population and to the side is a list of the top 17 ccTLDs by number of registrations.

Germany leads the list of course. I also included .EU, which now has more than 3 million registrations.

Since there are fewer countries to include, this map is smaller than the Country Codes of the World map.

We printed a small quantity because we’re not sure how many folks would want one, but if you, shipping is free for the next month.

Link

It’s not easy having an American English keyboard when you frequently need to input characters like è or ä or ç.

Or ¥. Or €.

Maybe it’s because I switch between Mac and Windows so frequently. Or maybe I’m just too lazy to remember the keyboard shortcuts.

Fortunately, I just discovered: CopyPasteCharacter.com.

Give it a shot and you’ll see how it works.

I’ve got the site bookmarked.

Now I’ll just have to remember where I saved the bookmark. ☺

PS: TypeIt is also a great solution.