Posted on June 16th, 2008 by John Yunker
I’m off to the Midwest today for two exciting events:
Localization Certification Program: North America
June 18, 2008
Boeing Institute of International Business, Saint Louis University
St. Louis, MO
I will join Nitish Singh in my hometown of St. Louis in talking about Web globalization best practices
Click here for more information
Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008
June 23-28, 2008
Indianapolis, IN
I will present The Best Global Medical Web Sites (and why)
Click here for more information
If you’re in the neighborhood, please let me know.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: Events
Posted on June 16th, 2008 by John Yunker
Nick Wilsdon at Multilingual Search quotes a Russian news story in which Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev says “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is a pretty serious thing. It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic.”
IDNs are “internationalized domain names” — which basically means domains that use non-Latin characters. The Internet wasn’t exactly designed to support IDNs, particularly in URLs, but this is about to change in a big way.
China has historically been the most vocal advocate for IDNs, but now Russia is making noise as well. ICANN is in the process of testing IDNs right now and has stated that it wants to have a formal process in place for supporting them by the end of this year.
IDNs are the last major step toward creating a truly user-friendly Internet for people who don’t speak English and don’t use Latin characters — which is quite a few people on this planet. I would not be surprised to see both China and Russia not only embrace IDNs but require foreign companies to register them if they wish to do business in their countries.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: China · Domain names · Russia
Posted on June 9th, 2008 by John Yunker
Apple today announced the iPhone 3G — a tri-band phone that will operate in most countries around the world. So it’s no surprise that Apple wants to sell the iPhone in as many of these countries as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, Apple supports a consistent design across its many country Web sites. So when it came time to go live with the translated Web content on 22+ local websites, the process was a relative breeze. Here are four country home pages:
Imagine how difficult this undertaking would be if each country had it own unique Web design requiring the redesigning of visuals for each site.
When it comes to global rollouts, it’s hard to argue with the efficiency of using a global template.
A globally consistent product requires a globally consistent Web site.
Having said this, Apple could still improve a great deal when it comes to Web localization. That is, a number of the local Web sites really aren’t all that local. Like this clip, from the Japan site — an A/V demo of the new MobileMe service — which is available in English only.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: Apple · Web Globalization · iPhone
Posted on June 8th, 2008 by John Yunker
I tried to login to Google Adwords recently and was met with the following “temporarily unavailable” Web page:
The page illustrates one of the many the challenges of managing a Web site that supports so many languages. Even something supposedly as simple as this temporary page is not quite so simple. There are a whopping 17 languages on this page — from Chinese to German to Japanese.
Google generally does a very good job of “guessing” the Web user’s language through a combination of geolocation and browser language detection — and then providing users with their matching language. But in this case Google simply slapped up a “one-size-fits-most” Web page — which is a lot of visual noise.
And even with 17 languages, the page comes up a bit short in serving all Adwords users — as Google Adwords supports more than 35 languages.
What’s the lesson here? That when it comes to Web globalization, no detail is too small — including those details such as error strings, 404 pages, and “temporarily unavailable” pages.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: China · Events · Google · Software Localization · US Hispanic Market · Web Globalization
Posted on June 5th, 2008 by John Yunker
McAfee has released a report that rates the world’s top level domains in terms of overall risk to the Web user — from browser exploits, phishing Web sites, excessive pop-ups, and other nasty things.
The report finds that “19.2% of all Web sites ending in the .hk domain pose a security threat to Web users.” Last year, Tokelau ( .tk) was the most dangerous ccTLD, at 10.1 percent.
Here are the five most dangerous domains:
Hong Kong (.hk)
PR of China (.cn)
Philippines (.ph)
Romania (.ro)
Russia (.ru)
And here are the five safest domains:
Finland (.fi)
Japan (.jp)
Norway (.no)
Slovenia (.si)
Colombia (.co)
It’s interesting to note that Asia includes both the safest domains and the most dangerous domains.
And I wonder if this report will help spur governments and their registries to be more aggressive in policing their local Web sites.
Advertisement: Track all of the world’s ccTLDs with the Country Codes of the World map.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: Domain names
Posted on June 4th, 2008 by John Yunker
Jane McConnell of NetStrategy/JMC is working on the third annual edition of the Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey and she needs your input.
If you are not familiar with the survey, you can read some key observations from 2007 on JMC’s blog Globally Local: 2007 Highlights. All survey participants receive a free copy of the Global Intranet Trends report. (Table of contents from 2007).
The 2008 survey will investigate new topics such as internal social networking and more details on 2.0 applications. Continuing issues such as the single point of access, ROI, overall positioning of the intranet in the organization, and many other points will also be covered.
Organizations are asked to sign up in advance. All you need to do is send an email (using your professional email address) to jane@netjmc.com specifying your name, title or role on the intranet, your organization’s name, number of employees, and the URL of your public web site. You will find more information on the Signup information page on the NetStrategy/JMC web.
As a participant, you have the opportunity to contribute to the topics and questions for 2008. After you sign up, you will receive a link to a 5-minute Quick Poll inviting you to give feedback on what is the most relevant for you at this point in time and to suggest specific topics and questions if you wish. The Quick Poll will be open until June 6th. The survey itself will take place between end June and mid August.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: Web Globalization
Posted on June 1st, 2008 by Jason Yu
As John wrote awhile back: All lucky numbers are local.
And this is particularly true in China, where people pay thousands of dollars to obtain license plates with lucky numbers.
So when it comes to naming products or setting prices, you have to be very careful about your choice of numbers. Here are some tips:
6 means “good fortune.”
8 means “abundance of wealth” or “make lots of money.”
The number 8 is a very lucky number, and the reason why China chose August 8th, 2008 to kick off Olympics Games. Vehicle license plates and cellphone numbers containing 6 or 8 are coveted and often auctioned to the highest bidder. A recent example: A C88888 vehicle license was auctioned in Guangdong where it sold for RMB800,000 (around USD113,000). The new owner hopes this license number helps bring good fortune — though presumably the owner was already fortunate enough to have the money to spend on the license plate.
9 means “forever.”
If a boy wants to buy a rose for his girlfriend, he will typically buy 9 roses. If he wants to splurge, he’ll buy 19 roses — and if he’s affluent, he’ll buy 99 roses. September 9th is Senior People Day in China, to ensure that th elderly live a healthy and long life.
4 is pronounced the same as “dead.”
13 means crazy, abnormal.
If a Chinese person says “you are 13″, it means “you are insane!” Some buildings, like in the US, avoid having a 13th floor. Instead, they use floor 12B. And although the pronunciation of 4 sounds like “dead,” there is a positive way to portray the number: In a musical scale, 4 is equialent to “fa,” which is pronounced closely to “make money” in Chinese. My old phone number contains “5854″ and my Chinese friends say it is a great number because it means “I make money and then I make money again.” I am happy to hear their comments.
51 in Chinese is pronounces like “I (5) wanna (1).”
You’ll find a lot of businesses and Websites using 51 in their names. 51job is the largest online human resources company. So you can tell a lot about a company simply by the numbers it uses in its domain name. Since 1 sounds like “wanna,” the number 18 is also popular as “wanna make money” and many people will choose the 18th of the month as a new business opening date or a wedding date.
Even numbers > odd numbers
Chinese people like to use even numbers rather than odd numbers because even number are related to the concept of “pairs” which usually means “perfect” in Chinese culture.
With regards to business, if a company produces different versions of products, expect them to produce 6, 8, or 12, 36 different versions. And you can always find prices like 88.00, 128.00; 156.00 in China’s shopping malls.
Jason is a partner at LingoSavvy and is based in Los Angeles. He holds a bachelor's degree in Journalism and Communication from Zhejiang University, China, as well as a master's degree in Communication Management from the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
Tags: Business globalization · China · Culture · Translation
Posted on May 21st, 2008 by John Yunker
Here are some more localized Chinese Web sites that have gone black:
McDonald’s
Cisco
Intel
Oracle
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: China · Web Globalization
Posted on May 21st, 2008 by John Yunker
If you visit the .com pages of Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and Amazon, you’ll see the usual bursts of color and promotional elements — that is, business as usual.
But if you visit the Chinese home pages of these five companies, you’re going to see the following:
Although white more commonly signifies death and mourning in China, black is a more effective way of expressing grief on the white background of a Web page.
Google China and Baidu have turned their logos black as well.
It’s just a shame more of the world won’t see these sites — as I found them quite moving. Everything about China seems to be beyond comprehension, including, unfortunately, this earthquake.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: Apple · China · Google · Web Globalization
Posted on May 16th, 2008 by John Yunker
What began as just another “gisting” application — like Babel Fish — is gradually becoming an impressive translation tool. And I’m not referring to the quality of translation, though that is improving as well.
I’m referring to the breadth of languages and breadth of features that Google Translate supports.
Today, Google announced that Google Translate added support for ten more languages, bringing the total to 23. The ten new languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.
And that’s not all!
Google Translate also now provides a detect language tool that will tell what language a batch of text is in. This type of tool can come in awfully handy for people like me who navigate across so many languages on a daily basis. It’s an easy feature for Google to support because the translation engine needs to know what the source language is before translating it. But I also tested language detect on a few languages not yet supported for translation, such as Slovakian, and the engine correctly identified them.
A week ago, I integrated Google Translate into the home page of Byte Level:
When it comes to translation, I’m not a good example of “putting my money where my mouth is.” Byte Level Research, with the exception of the Tower of Babel site, has been available only in English for years.
While I have no illusions that this widget will make up for a lack of professionally translated text, I am curious to see if people use it and to what extent. What I need to know is if Google Analytics can track Google Translate widget usage so I can know which languages are most popular. If anyone knows how to set this up, please contact me.
And, if nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment — and it buys me time before having to shell out real money for professional translation, which I will ultimately need to do.
John Yunker lives in Seattle and works for Microsoft on the Global Product Development Framework team. He is a co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Tags: Google · Languages · Machine Translation · Translation
