Global by Design

Google announced that they now have 30 products available in 30 languages. And many of these products, such as Gmail and Adwords, now support 40 languages.

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.

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Techcrunch reports from Facebook’s developer conference today in which company announced that it would open its “crowdsourcing” translation platform to its legion of application developers. Here’s the press release excerpt:

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.

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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!

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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!

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Apple seems to have made a mess of its new iPhone rollout.

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.

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I will be presenting a Webinar sponsored by Lionbridge this Wednesday and I hope you can join us.

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.

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