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?
Languages are a means to an end, and in web globalization, languages help you expand your global reach.
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.
We reviewed 225 web sites for the Report Card, which means 200 sites didn’t make the “cut.”
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.
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.
