Planet Web I18n

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team recently completed their latest development sprint, with a special focus on preparing for the upcoming deployment of the Universal Language Selector (ULS) extension on multiple wikis. The team also hosted a ULS-specific office hour on May 8, 2013 (logs).

ULS deployment prep

The Language Engineering team is working on refining several important features of the Universal Language Selector. This extension will provide an umbrella of services including selection of UI language, input tools and fonts. ULS will superannuate Narayam and Webfonts to provide a unified solution for configuring language settings for MediaWiki. During this development sprint, critical bugs related to positioning of ULS’ activation area and its “cog icon” label were fixed. These affected multiple MediaWiki skins and interlanguage wiki pages. The improved version will be deployed over several phases. More information about the upcoming deployment can be found in the deployment schedule.

ULS testing

ULS features are to be verified based on the test scenarios identified. These scenarios, based on the Cucumber framework, can be adapted for automatic as well as manual testing. The scenarios cover core features of ULS: triggers, language settings panel, display settings, font selection and input tools selection. These have been written in a simple “Given-When-Then” format and provide the steps for easy walkthroughs. The testing instance hosts all the latest updates that are being made. The team is looking for volunteers who can help us with testing and reporting bugs. Let us know if you would like to join and help (write to runa at wikimedia dot org or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n) .

What’s next

The team will be completing all feature changes and testing them by end of the current sprint to be ready for kicking-off the roll-out of phase 1 of ULS. Roll-out will be coordinated by Niklas Laxström with administrators of all scheduled wikis. The team will also be hosting a bug triage session on May 29, 2013 on freenode.net IRC on the #mediawiki-i18n channel.

ULS is live on Commons!

Meanwhile, based on consensus reached by the Commons community, Universal Language Selector and the Translate extensions have been enabled on Commons.

For more details about the Language Engineering projects and ways to participate, please write to me [runa at wikimedia dot org] or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Speaking of country codes, I’ve been meaning to mention this.

Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) now offers users an impressive range of country code domains.

Here’s the full list of supported country codes.

It appears that Microsoft is using geolocation to enforce that you have to be based in a given region to register its country code.

So I won’t be able to easily register, say, Outlook.my.

 

 

The post Microsoft Outlook now supports 32 country codes appeared first on Global by Design.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published a second Last Call working draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0.

The draft implements all changes since the previous publication of 11 April 2013. There are no remaining open issues. The Working Group is planning to finalize ITS 2.0 now: this is your last time to provide feedback! The Last Call period ends 11 June.

ITS 2.0 provides metadata to foster the adoption of the multilingual Web.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Requirements for Hangul Text Layout and Typography and is looking for feedback.

This document describes requirements for general Korean language/Hangul text layout and typography realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. The document is mainly based on a project to develop the international standard for Korean text layout.

Please send comments to public-i18n-cjk@w3.org (subscribe, archives) by 14 June

.

A Korean version of the document is also available (한국어 텍스트 레이아웃 및 타이포그래피를 위한 요구사항), but the English version is the authoritative version.

A report summarizing the MultilingualWeb workshop in Rome is now available from the MultilingualWeb site. It contains a summary of each session with links to presentation slides and more detailed scribing done on site in Rome. Links to video for each session will be posted soon.

With approximately 150 attendees, the Rome Workshop focused on the theme “Making the Multilingual Web Work” and emphasized information about the best practices and standards that help content creators and localizers ensure that the World-Wide Web lives up to its name, across boundaries of language and culture. Attendees heard from a variety of perspectives, with fruitful dialogue between various stakeholder groups involved in trying to expand the multilingual scope of the Web.

Taking place over two days (12 and 13 March, 2013) at the headquarters of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Workshop featured twenty-four conference-style presentations, seven poster presentations, and an “open space” discussion that featured six breakout sessions focusing on key topics that emerged during the Workshop. In addition, it showcased technology implementations of the forthcoming internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 standard.

The Workshop was sponsored by the EU-funded QTLaunchPad project and Verisign. It was run by the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group.

The .co domain is the country code of Colombia.

But a few years back Colombia sold its soul (I mean, licensed its country code).

So now .co can be registered pretty much by anyone, similar to generic top-level domains such as .com and .net.

Over the past few years the .co domain has become quite popular, used by startups such as Vine.co and Donuts.co. Twitter uses t.co as a link shortener.

When you register a country code for use as a generic domain, you want to be sure that search engines don’t view your website as limited to only that country.

Fortunately, Google is on top of the situation.

According to Search Engine Roundtable, here are the country codes (ccTLDs) Google now treats as generic:

• ad
• as
• bz
• cc
• cd
• co
• dj
• fm
• gg
• io
• la
• me
• ms
• nu
• sc
• sr
• su
• tv
• tk
• ws

But what if I want my country code to act like a country code?

Let’s suppose you’re a business located in Colombia and you  register .co. You want search engines to recognize your domain as a country code, not some globally generic identifier.

Well, there’s a solution for this as well, at least with Google. Using Google Webmaster Tools you can tell Google to view your domain not as generic but as specific to a country or region.

It’s not the most elegant solution and I’m unclear on if/how Bing manages the issue, but it’s where we stand today with the world’s largest search engine.

Related links:

• Matt Cutts talks about ccTLDs and geolocation
• More information on Google geotargeting
• My list of country codes used as generic country codes

The post When country codes go generic appeared first on Global by Design.

We studied 12 enterprise technology websites for the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card.

The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world.

Out of those 12 companies, Cisco Systems emerged on top.

Cisco emerged on top for three main reasons.

First, it leads the category in languages with 40 (not counting English), followed by IBM and Xerox.

Second, as shown below, the website is globally consistent.

Cisco supports a global template that is flexible enough to support local content and promotions.

Third, Cisco leads the sector in its support for locally relevant social networks.

Shown below is the template used on the .com website:

And here is the template used on South Korean website:

Note how the template supports the insertion of locally specific feeds.

Many companies still cling to the idea that they can support just one English-language Twitter or Facebook page for the world.

But all this feed does is reach English speakers around the world. If you’re really serious about a given country you need to fully support its languages. And Cisco is well ahead of most companies in its support for local-language social networks and videos.

Regarding global navigation, there is still room for improvement. The gateway relies on a pop-up window, shown here:

I’d prefer to see Cisco use a globe icon to highlight the gateway in the header (instead of simply using a “Worldwide” link). And the gateway itself could be better executed.

That said, Cisco is by far the leader in the global enterprise technology category — and it is also a top 5 website.

Here are the 12 enterprise technology websites included in the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Autodesk
• Cisco Systems
• Dolby
• EMC
• IBM
• Intel
• NetApp
• Oracle
• Renesas
• SAP
• Texas Instruments
• Xerox

Read more in the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card.

Also included with the Report Card is the Enterprise Technology Website report.

 

The post Cisco Systems: The Best Global Enterprise Technology Website appeared first on Global by Design.

For goodness' sake, how many myths are there? The answer is, as many as I have heard. But truly, there are fewer than 15, so read on! This is one that keeps popping up like a bad penny:

"ISO-8859-1 is the standard encoding for HTML."

Sooooo, does that mean all those Web pages in Japanese and Chinese are a bunch of standard-violating hacks? No, of course not. It is perfectly legal to use any charset in a Web page, but it should be declared. Why? Because ISO-8859-1 is the default charset for HTML (yes, even in HTML 4.0). That means if you don't declare the charset of your page, a browser (or any other HTML interpreter) is free to assume that it's in ISO-8859-1. Now, admittedly, in practice browsers make other assumptions. Typically you set a preference for a default charset (or character encoding, if you prefer). This is sometimes set based on the localization you install; for example, if you install a Russian version of the browser, it may set the default charset as "KOI8-R". But the point is that assumptions will be made, unless you declare the charset in your document. And it's very straightforward. Just put a META tag as the first tag in the HEAD section, like so:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" VALUE="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Simple, right? Oh yes, and I sneaked in a better charset to "default" to - UTF-8. UTF-8 is an encoding of Unicode, nearly universally supported, covering most of the living languages of the world. Use it and all your cares will be over - uh oh, see Myth #4.

In the recently concluded development sprint, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team made a new release of the Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB), fixed bugs related to the Page Translation feature in Translate UX (TUX) and began work on design changes for the Universal Language Selector (ULS). The team also hosted a bug triage session that was well attended.

Universal Language Selector Design Changes

Development and design changes have been initiated for the Universal Language Selector. The option to position the extension’s main panel in the sidebar was added and this feature is now being polished. Changes to the layout of the Language Settings dialog have been initiated, and usability tests for the proposed design changes were also done.

Using Wikimedia’s default GeoIP locator, ULS can now infer the user’s location and suggest language preferences.

MLEB Release

The April release for the Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) was announced by Amir Aharoni. Starting with this release, MLEB is no longer compatible with MediaWiki 1.19. MLEB 2013.04 and its later versions can only be used with MediaWiki version 1.20.4 or above.

The notable changes include update to CLDR v.23, bug fixes to further stabilize TUX and design changes for the Universal Language Selector. An experimental feature to present a restricted translation environment for new translators was developed for TUX. This is not enabled by default. Basic support for the XLIFF file format has also been added to Translate.

Up Next

During the next development cycle, the team will complete the changes to the Universal Language Selector design and test the features. The team is also participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program for Women (OPW), and will be working on completing the tasks in the next stages of the programs. More information about the other open projects for internationalization can be found in the master list.

The next Language Engineering office hour will be held on 8 May 2013 at 17:00 UTC (10:00 PDT) in #wikimedia-office on Freenode IRC.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

FEISGILLT 2013 will showcase the upcoming Internationalization Tag Set 2.0 standard, together with closely related, core localization standards like XLIFF. FEISGILTT 2013 is the preconference event of Localization World, London 2013

. W3C members will get 20% discount for FEISGILTT. FEISGILTT participants are entitled to a 10% discount when registering for the main conference. However, registering for the main conference is NOT required to register for FEISGILTT.

Quim Gil, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Contributor Coordinator, recently wrote about internship programs that the Wikimedia tech community participates in. These programs provide a valuable platform for a diverse group of contributors and nurture deeper collaboration across open source communities. He also shared details about participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for Wikimedia projects.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team welcomes students to participate in the projects listed for Google Summer of Code and those listed for the Outreach Program for Women. The projects listed aim to resolve shortcomings or enhance various language tools that the team maintains; they include:

• improving the jQuery.ime input method library;
• building browser extensions for stand-alone operation of input methods;
• creating a dashboard for language coverage information;
• converting legacy wiki content into translatable entries.

Providing support for nearly 300 languages is no easy feat. There is constant demand for enhancements of tools, and this demand is only expected to grow. The team constantly encourages volunteers including students, language community members and others, to work with them on internationalization challenges. This includes various components like Translate UX (TUX) and Project Milkshake, in which participants can:

• increase coverage of input methods and font library;
• improve language rules for the internationalization library;
• test and prepare validation tools;
• test and enhance the translation tool;
• write documents.

They can also contribute by building extensions like SpellingApi and LocalisationUpdate, or even creating usable multi-lingual CAPTCHAs.

Open projects are also added to the master list maintained for all mentorship programs. After ascertaining the availability of mentors, participants can collaborate on a project of interest. If no mentors are listed, students can ask the team on  #mediawiki-i18n (Freenode IRC) or write to me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for more information.

We look forward to all the exciting proposals for our projects for Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. Student applications close on May 3rd and May 1st respectively.  Time is short — apply now!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm basics is a repackaging of the initial part of “What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup” as a standalone article. It provides a gentle introduction to the behaviour of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, and helps you understand why bidirectional text in Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana, Urdu, etc. behaves the way it does.

Among the Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia has the highest number of individual language projects — 285. The Language Engineering team focuses on building language tools and assets that improve the ability to interact with any article on Wikipedia. Language assets like fonts and input methods are integrated into MediaWiki and its extensions, and our wikis are localized using collaborative translation with translation tools to ensure a decent user experience.

Collaboration in Language Projects and the Language Maven Program

Language tools are constantly evolving to ensure support for our users. It is a slow if not impossible task to scale our small engineering team to support hundreds of languages without close collaboration with our language communities, which have many capable and technically-savvy editors and administrators.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team has compiled a proposal for the formation of a special interest group named the Language Mavens. With members from various language communities from around the globe, we hope to learn from our users, seek advice, guidance and validation on language features. We hope that the Language Mavens will pull in participation from community members and experts who care about language support features and their adoption in the wikis they read and contribute to.

Getting started with the Maven Program

The Language Maven pilot was rolled out earlier this month on April 13 with a meeting that was well attended. Program scope and activities were discussed. One of the recommendations was to ensure that documents and handy checklists be prepared for easy reference to the language tools available to each language community. Activities that the Mavens can participate in include usability tests, bug triages, testing days and even blogging to share valuable insights about the internationalization tools in their favorite language wiki projects.

The Mavens program is aimed to focus on collecting feedback and providing support for language tools and assets being deployed by the team. This will help develop a long-term user group that will be instrumental in helping other language community members learn more about the latest language features and tools being rolled out. The Maven team expects to meet once every month and communicate through the mediawiki-i18n mailing list. To participate as a Language Maven, please fill up this form to let us know about your interest or ping me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for any questions!

Help us make your language experience better — join the Mavens!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

The deadline for position papers is 30 April 2013. Please submit your (brief) position paper soon to ensure you have a place.

eBooks & i18n: Richer Internationalization for eBooks on 4 June 2013 in Tokyo, Japan, will investigate international requirements related to eBooks that needs to be added to the Open Web Platform. The Open Web Platform includes core W3C technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG, XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, PNG, RDF, and many more, that are used extensively in eBooks and eBook production.

The goal is to make the various eBook reading platforms suitable for electronic books that use the printing and typesetting traditions of different cultures.

See the Call for Participation for details.

I recently gave a talk via Lionbridge webinar on the globalization of retail websites.

I talked at length about Amazon — a company widely considered to be the leader in global ecommerce.

And yet after nearly 20 years in business, the company supports only 9 country websites.

So what gives? Shouldn’t Amazon have launched 40 or more country websites by now?

After all, Facebook went from 2 languages to more than 70 in two years.

Though I believe Amazon should have launched more country websites by now, I will say this:

When it comes to retail, the world is anything by flat.

Just because someone halfway around the world can easily visit your website and view your products doesn’t mean they’ll be inclined to buy those products. That’s because these products have to be shipped (and this alone could be prohibitively expensive). There also may be concerns regarding returns and customer support.

Retail globalization is extremely complex. And expensive. And risky.

Here are some of the “risk factors” that Amazon cites when discussing the challenges of expanding into new markets:

• Government regulation of e-commerce
• Restrictions on sales or distribution of certain products or services
• Limited fulfillment and technology infrastructure
• Laws and regulations regarding consumer and data protection
• Lower levels of use of the Internet
• Lower levels of consumer spendingand fewer opportunities for growth compared to the U.S.
• Lower levels of credit card usage and increased payment risk
• Difficulty in staffing, developing and managing foreign operations as a result of distance, language and cultural differences

Yet, risks aside, Amazon is still bullish about it’s long-term goals:

We expect that, over time, our International segment will represent 50% or more of our consolidated net sales.

So where does Amazon stand today? According to their most recent annual report, international sales make up 43% of revenues, which is actually down a notch from the year prior. Though it should be noted that North American sales continue to grow as well.

I think that over the past few years  Amazon put the brakes on global expansion. Perhaps it  wanted to devote more resources to the Kindle and related software, as well as its publishing and producing businesses. Or, perhaps it had data to support not expanding into additional markets. Whatever the reason, Amazon did leave the door open to competitors.

During this time, Apple has built out its iTunes platform to sell digital content in 51 markets. And Google Play continues to expand as well.

Granted, expanding digital ecommerce is far easier than expanding the ecommerce of physical goods. But even if all you do is focus on digital ecommerce, Amazon is in danger of losing its edge.

Fortunately, I just read that Amazon appears to be (at last) expanding into Russia. So maybe the push to expand globally is back on.

We shall see.

 

The post For Amazon (and other retailers), the world is not flat appeared first on Global by Design.

Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts
This tutorial has been modified to bring it in line with the current tutorial format. Rather than contain duplicate content, it now introduces the novice to key concepts and points off to useful further reading in an organized fashion. It has been completely rewritten.

Text direction and structural markup in HTML
This article has been created from material formerly in the tutorial “Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts” and augmented with information about new HTML5 markup constructs that are beginning to see adoption. It should be regarded as a new article, focusing on applying bidi markup to document- and block-level content, including forms.

What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup
This is an update of an existing article, but it has been almost completely rewritten. The most significant changes are the new parts describing how to apply the new HTML5 constructs which are beginning to see adoption. Additional changes will be needed as HTML5 bidi markup is finalised over the coming months. The article also proposes a simpler way to approach markup of bidi text, particularly useful for those with less experience, that relies less on a deep understanding of the issues involved.

Visual vs. logical ordering of text
This is a new article created from material that has been removed from the previously mentioned articles. It was removed into a separate article because visual ordering is much less important these days, and to avoid duplication. Only a few changes have been made to the content itself.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team continued to develop additional features for Translate UX (TUX) and to fix bugs, including a number of critical bugs that affected Microsoft Internet Explorer. TUX has now been deployed on Wikimedia sites and on translatewiki.net. The team also launched the new outreach program, called Language Mavens, and conducted an office hour.

Redesigning the main page of translatewiki.net

As part of the original specifications for TUX, the translatewiki.net main page is being redesigned. The layout will now include a set of tiles for the project groups that will contain the projects’ logo and statistics. The links conveniently placed on the tiles can be used to access the project messages for translation and proofreading. Once logged in, users will be presented with summarized statistics of their recent activities.

Significant changes are also planned for the account sign-up form. Along with features that will allow newly signed-up users to familiarize themselves with the translation workflow, it’ll make the process of getting the translation permissions smoother. The page will also include artwork to depict cultural diversity from around the world. The main page is currently under preparation, but the special page can already be accessed on translatewiki.net.

Language Mavens: The new outreach program

Language Mavens, the new outreach program for the Language Engineering team, was launched to provide better support to the various language communities within Wikimedia projects. The program was announced during the monthly office-hour (read the logs). After a meeting with the initial group of participants, the pilot phase is now underway. The program aims to regularly connect with the language communities across the Wikimedia projects to get feedback about the user experience and any improvements needed in the language support features. To optimize the internationalization tools and workflows, the program will also facilitate participation in activities such as bug triages and testing days. The team will hold regular meetings with the Maven team members. The program is open for participation, and new members can sign up online. To get more details about the program, you can read the program’s description and write to runa at wikimedia dot org.

Up next

For the next development sprints, the team will continue to work on the projects mentioned above, and also devote significant efforts on redesigning the Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface based on the design review document. The Language Engineering team will host a community bug triage session on April 24th, 2013 at 17:00 UTC. The team also invites students participating in Google’s Summer of Code 2013, to work with them on several internationalization projects.

To know more about our projects and ways to participate, please find us on the IRC channel #mediawiki-i18n (Freenode) or write to runa at wikimedia dot org.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) document register is now freely available for public access. This change has been made to increase public involvement in the ongoing deliberations of the UTC in its work developing and maintaining the Unicode Standard and other related standards and reports. Open access to the document register makes it easier to search both current and historical documents for topics of interest, using widely available search engines. The UTC document register contains online documents dating back to 1997 and online registers for paper document distributions dating back to 1991.

During a breakout session held at the MultilingualWeb Workshop in Rome it was decided to form a W3C Community Group to push forward the concept of Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data. This group has now been formed and there are already 24 participants. See the group home page.

The group plans to crowd-source ideas from the community regarding best practices for producing multilingual linked open data. Key topics for discussion are naming, labeling, interlinking, and quality of multilingual linked data, but there may be others. Use cases will be identified to motivate discussions. Participation both from academia and industry is expected. The main outcome of the group will be the documentation of patterns and best practices for the creation, linking, and use of multilingual linked data.

You can join the group with either a full W3C member account or by getting a W3C Public Account. Over the coming weeks Felix Sasaki, Jose E. Gayo and Jorge Gracia will work on a roadmap, publication plan and strategy for the group. Any queries can be directed to Dominic Jones.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published an updated working draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0.

The draft reflects changes since the last call publication 6 December 2012 and asks for feedback on the remaining open issues.

ITS 2.0 provides metadata to foster the adoption of the multilingual Web.

The latest data from IDC show the sharpest decline in PC sales on record. From the release:

“Although the reduction in shipments was not a surprise, the magnitude of the contraction is both surprising and worrisome,” said David Daoud, IDC Research Director, Personal Computing. “The industry is going through a critical crossroads, and strategic choices will have to be made as to how to compete with the proliferation of alternative devices and remain relevant to the consumer.”

So is it safe to say we are not longer “entering” the post-PC era and are now living in it?

I would say so, with a caveat.

As global transformations go, this one has been highly uneven.

The fact is, there are many people in the US who don’t own a mobile phone or a tablet. For these folks, the post-PC era has not yet arrived.

And if you look outside the US, you might say we’ve been living in the post-PC era for quite some time. Or, to be more accurate, a non-PC era.

That is, many emerging markets leapfrogged PCs altogether (from the consumer’s perspective) and have been mobile-centric all along.

Case in point is this chart of PC vs. mobile Internet usage in India, courtesy of KPCB and StatCounter.

 

Judging by this chart you could argue that India has been “post-PC” since 2011.

Last year, I updated the Report Card methodology to factor in the globalization of mobile websites and mobile apps. This year, I’ve given additional weight to companies that treat mobile on par with PC in regards to globalization investment, which is a key factor why Hotels.com performed so well and why Google retained the top spot.

Needless to say, these are challenging times for web teams that must support a dizzying array of devices and screen sizes.

But this is also an exciting time. The Internet is, for millions of people, more within reach than ever before.

The post Living in a post-PC world appeared first on Global by Design.

During my work for the Web Globalization Report Card I encountered a number of US-focused websites relying on language negotiation (also known as language detection) to make their Spanish-language websites impossible to ignore.

Shown above is the overlay used on the T-Mobile website.

And below is the Ford website overlay:

What language negotiation does is look at the language setting of the web user’s browser. If Spanish is detected as the preference, the website displays an overlay that asks the user to confirm his or her language preference.

Language negotiation is far from a perfect technology so it’s best to ask users to confirm their setting.

The overlay provides a nice tool for making Spanish content discoverable while also allowing users to stay in control of what language they prefer to use. It’s fair to say that many US-based web users may have web browsers set to Spanish but may prefer to see the English-language websites. The fact is, unfortunately, many companies don’t fully translate all English content into the target language — and people know this.

If you do implement this approach for your website, it’s vital that you provide a visual global gateway in the header so users can easily change settings at any time.

The post Bienvenido: Using language negotiation to support bilingual US websites appeared first on Global by Design.

I’m still trying to understand why Google is killing Google Reader and, along with it presumably, Feedburner.

I love RSS and rely on it to follow more than a hundred blogs. What about Twitter? Facebook? I’m sorry, but the signal-to-noise ratio just doesn’t cut it for me. They certainly have their roles to play, but they don’t beat plain ol’ RSS for keeping me posted on everything new on a given blog.

So the purpose of this post is to ask you — assuming you’re following this blog via RSS — to update your feed address to:

http://www.globalbydesign.com/feed/

This way, no matter what Google does to Feedburner, you’ll still get the latest from this blog.

Thanks!

The post Update your RSS feed for Global by Design appeared first on Global by Design.

eBooks & i18n: Richer Internationalization for eBooks on 4 June 2013 in Tokyo, Japan, will investigate international functionality that needs to be added to the Open Web Platform. The Open Web Platform includes core W3C technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG, XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, PNG, RDF, and many more, that are used extensively in eBooks and eBook production.

The goal is to make the various eBook reading platforms suitable for electronic books that use the printing and typesetting traditions of different cultures. If you are interested in participating, please submit a position paper by 30 April 2013. See the Call for Participation for details.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team completed its recent development sprints with a focus on feature completeness of ‘Translate User eXperience’ or ‘TUX’ for deployment and also made preparations for its new community outreach project. Below are some of the highlights from the sprint.

 

Translate Editor – TUX, has been deployed: The Language Engineering team has been blogging on improvements to the Translate Extension which has now been deployed to WMF sites and been enabled as the default editor on translatewiki.net. Issues encountered while using the new editor can be reported via Bugzilla. More details about TUX’s design features can be found in our previous blog post.

New Language Outreach Program: A new outreach and support program to facilitate feedback from our language wiki projects is also currently in development. The program would facilitate focused feedback about the tools being developed and reaching out with solutions to the larger communities working on Wikimedia projects in various languages. The pilot phase is scheduled for launch in the coming weeks and an announcement with the details of the program will be shortly made.

Updates to the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB): In other news, Amir Aharoni announced the release of the new version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB). Besides development updates to TUX, version 2013.3 of MLEB includes bug fixes to the Universal Language Selector (ULS) as well as new fonts for Hebrew, Javanese and Arabic. Last but not least, a Marshallese input method has been contributed to jQuery.ime by Nick Doiron.

Testing plan for language tools: A preliminary outline of a testing plan for all internationalization tools currently maintained by the team was completed. Guided by earlier discussions with the Fedora Localization Testing Group (FLTG), the initial draft includes setup of test environment, preparing test scenarios, collecting feedback and analyzing results.

Preparations for visualization of language coverage information: Work also continued on the Language Coverage Matrix, a collection of data about the availability of language tools for different languages in Wikimedia projects. Currently, the focus is to prepare a technical specification for automated presentation and access to this information.

Event participation and other news: Siebrand Mazeland represented the Wikimedia Language Engineering team at the Internationalization and Localization Conference organized by Lingoport in Santa Clara. (More details: presentation slides, and talk recording)

The ongoing development sprint will focus on creating a new design for the translatewiki.net homepage, launch of the pilot phase for Language support outreach program, and publication of the Language Engineering roadmap for the next fiscal year 2013-2014. The Language Engineering team is also looking to hire JavaScript and PHP engineers with deep experience in i18n and l10n technologies. Additionally, a few of the projects that are open for participation have been listed here.

The Language Engineering team is available to answer any technical questions you may have about the tools it develops. You can join us at our monthly office hour scheduled this month on April 10, 1700 UTC and 1000 PDT or find us on irc.freenode.net at #mediawiki-i18n. Logs from the last office hour held on March 13, 2013 can be found here.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

WhatsApp is now supporting 16 languages with the addition of Thai, shown here:

I noted earlier how much I admired their global gateway. Simple and effective.

 

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We studied 18 consumer technology websites for the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card.

The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world.

Out of those 18 companies, Samsung emerged on top.

Samsung emerged on top not because it leads in languages or global consistency, though it is strong in both respects.

Samsung supports an impressive 41 languages, not including US English. Apple, by comparison, stands at 31 languages.

Samsung emerged on top in large part because it has been aggressive  in engaging with users via social media across a number of languages and countries.

Note the bottom third of  Japan home page:

Samsung embraces a range of social platforms to communicate and engage with users — in their local languages.

Samsung also leverages these platforms to provide customer support, as shown here:

Many comparisons have been made lately between Apple and Samsung.

When simply comparing their global websites, clear distinctions are hard to miss.

Samsung has embraced social networking while Apple has not. Samsung appears to be comfortable with a certain level of visual chaos that comes  with supporting social networks and interacting publicly with customers. There are signs on the US website that Samsung is moving towards a new Samsung Nation model in which users register to earn points and virtual goodies — as well as connect with friends via Facebook. The degree to which this model will scale globally remains to be seen though I suspect Asia will pose a challenge.

Apple, on the other hand, presents a clean and consistent design template to the world. There is nothing scattered or busy about an Apple websites (except, I would argue, for its excessive use of flags). And consistency has served Apple quite nicely, though Apple has moved more slowly from a globalization perspective than Samsung.

Regarding the global gateway, Samsung buries the link to the gateway in the footer (not good).

Tthe gateway  itself is well organized, though the flags should be eliminated. As a general rule, flags should be avoided (a subject for a future post).

Finally, Samsung has been aggressive in updating its mobile website experience.

In the past two months, it launched a new mobile-optimized website, shown on the right:

Notice how social icons are front and center. Also notice in the header how Samsung detects the use of an iPhone and instantly poses a comparison test.

Sneaky but smart.

While Samsung still has room for improvement, it does so many things well that it earned out the number one spot, outperforming companies like Apple, Panasonic, and Lenovo.

Here are the 18 consumer technology websites included in the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Acer
• Adobe
• Apple
• Canon
• Dell
• HP
• HTC
• Lenovo
• LG
• McAfee
• Microsoft
• Nikon
• Nokia
• Panasonic
• Samsung
• Sony
• Symantec

Read more in the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card.

Or you can purchase just the Consumer Technology Website report.

Also included:

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An interesting article on the development of a new multi-script font.

To create the font, four designers worked on a script each: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic.

The end result is a font that provides a consistent look and feel across good range of languages.

I like this quote from the lead designer:

To draw a parallel with the world of music, I see ourselves as four musicians who improvised together on a musical theme fixed by one of them – this implies a lot of freedom, but also a lot of effort, listening to the others and building upon their improvisations.”

In fact, the decentralized model is similar in many ways to that of successful web and software globalization projects. You need local-language experts to play an active role early on in the process, while still sharing global goals.

 

 

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An Indic Layout Task Force has just been announced, as part of the W3C Internationalization Activity. Similar to the very successful Japanese Layout Task Force, the Indic group will provide input to the W3C Open Web Platform related to Indic Languages and Layout.

This task force will gather and integrate feedback from the participating members about the needs and technical feasibility of Indic requirements, and will report the results of its activities as a group back to the Internationalization Core Working Group, as well as to other relevant groups and to the W3C membership and community.

The chair of the Task Force is Swaran Lata, the contact person at the Indian Office of W3C is Somnath Chandra, and the Staff Contact is Richard Ishida. See the home page for more information.

In order to participate in, or follow, the work of the Task Force, please subscribe to the mailing list of the Task Force. You therewith also become a member of the Internationalization Interest Group.

Here is the image used on Apple’s China home page to announce Tim Cook’s apology letter regarding Apple repair and warranty “misunderstandings.”

Here is The Wall Street Journal take on the matter.

From a web globalization perspective, what interests me is how Apple’s design template allows for localized messages.

Apple placed this message in one of its “lesser” promotional windows, the one near the footer of the page.

These windows are quite handy for localized announcements. Every company should build into its global template the flexibility to allow for last-minute local announcements.

Now, what I don’t like about these windows is that they rely exclusively on images with embedded text. Locking in text may allow complete control over appearance but also cost you in localization overhead. While it may be trivial to localize a Photoshop file for one market — multiply that by 30 markets on a weekly or monthly basis and costs do become a factor.

But what I do like about the windows is that they can be easily swapped in and out based on the market, for local products, promotions, or, in this case, a heartfelt apology.

 

The post Apple’s China apology and the value of a flexible global template appeared first on Global by Design.