Planet I18n

China now leads in Internet users (and country codes)

2008-07-26T02:46:13+00:00

The NY Times reports that China has surpassed the US in terms of Internet users. This comes via China’s state-controlled Internet Network Information Center. Here are the key numbers:

United States

220 million Internet users

70% penetration

China

253 million Internet users

19% penetration

For readers of this blog, this development is hardly news. But it’s significant nonetheless. After all, the US isn’t exactly going to catch back up in this regard. China wins the numbers game, at least when it comes to people.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from the article:

Baidu, for instance, said on Thursday that its second-quarter net profit had jumped 81 percent. During that period, Baidu had a 63 percent share of China’s search engine market, while Google had about 26 percent, with Yahoo trailing far behind, according to iResearch, a market research firm based in Beijing.

Tencent, a popular site for social networking and gaming, now has a stock market value of $15 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies. In comparison, Amazon.com is valued at about $30 billion.

China also leads in having the world’s most popular country code (.cn).

Has Google hit a language ceiling?

2008-07-24T15:27:57+00:00

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.

How do you figure out what languages a book has been translated into?

2008-07-24T12:24:59+00:00

I was watching an interview of an author this morning, and by way of introduction, the interviewer said that the author’s book had been “translated into 30 languages.”

That’s a standard phrase, but I wondered which 30 languages the book had been translated into.

And then I realized I have no idea how to find out the answer to that question.

Do you?

Will Facebook become the world’s largest translation platform?

2008-07-23T21:39:26+00:00

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.

Unicode Normalization in Ruby?

2008-07-19T05:29:10+00:00

Last week I gave a little talk on Unicode at the DC Ruby Users Group. I have met some really interesting folks in that group; if you’re in the DC area and into Ruby I highly recommend it.

The talk was a high-level overview of “why Unicode matters,” more than a nitty-gritty down-to-the-bits sort of thing. In my experience the former issue is often more problematic than the latter, so that’s where I focused my attention.

Anyway, as a result of chatting with some folks I decided I would try to get a couple of very small-scale open source Ruby projects rolling. There are some READMEs scribbled at at github.com, and I’m going to try to work regularly there.

I have two initial ideas:

Trying to do a pure-Ruby port of Python’s unicodedata module
Statistical language identification with Ruby1.9

#1 is something I miss a lot in Ruby.
#2 is something I’ve had some success with in Python already, and I’d like to get it running in Ruby and turn it into a gem or something, as I imagine it would be of use to others.

Basically, I’m interested in collaborating on Ruby stuff that intersects with language, i18n, l10n, and all the rest of the stuff I babble about around these parts. Comments welcome…

PS: This stuff will be GPL’d. Free Software FTW.

DomainUnavailable.me

2008-07-17T22:03:04+00:00

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!

The iPhone App localization opportunity

2008-07-14T15:41:37+00:00

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!

Living in iPhone upgrade limbo

2008-07-11T16:04:43+00:00

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.

Web globalization trends: A free Webinar

2008-07-07T15:20:47+00:00

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.

Google perpetuates the American .com myth

2008-07-04T19:23:30+00:00

Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today.

This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent flaw in hosting an American visual at Google.com: The .com address is not synonymous with USA.

I know, it’s a picky thing. And yet it’s not such a picky thing. I work with numerous multinationals that now host their American Web sites at the .us domain — and their global Web sites at the .com domain. This makes perfect sense.

And yet Google, in applying the American visual to the .com site, perpetuates this idea that .com is a uniquely American URL.

Granted, Google doesn’t show residents of France and Germany and other countries this visual even if they input Google.com; Google uses geolocation to serve up localized Web pages based on the Web user’s location.

I understand Google has a dilemma on its hands. Because most Americans believe .com to be an American domain, Google might appear unpatriotic if it didn’t continue this .com/4th of July tradition.

But what I would like to see happen is Google launching a .us search engine. Not only would Google benefit from having another country country code to monetize, but those multinationals that currently host .us Web sites would be rewarded for their efforts.

The coming gTLD explosion (or not)

2008-06-30T12:49:35+00:00

ICANN, the folks who manage Internet domains, recently decided to open up the generic top-level domain (gTLD) space to anyone who can afford it and can navigate ICANN’s complex approval process.

gTLDs are those domains to the right of the dot in the URL, such as .com and .biz. Currently there are 21 gTLDs. But going forward, there is no limit to the number of gTLDs that can be registered. A company could register one, a city could register one, even an individual.

The media are predicting a bewildering array of new gTLDs in the months ahead.

But I’m not so sure we’ll see such a domain land rush. For starters, the process and costs of getting approval for a new gTLD are going to eliminate only the most passionate (and well-funded) supporters.

In the near future, I do see domains such as .berlin (and other cities) and .sport (and other topical words) emerging.

The big question will be to what extent the corporate world participates in registering gTLDs. Will we see a .coke or .pepsi or .google emerge? Odds are pretty good that we’ll see a .google simply because Google can actually manage its domain fairly well. As for Coke or Pepsi, I’m not so sure. Which leads us to the need for third-party domain service providers who could help companies like Coke and Pepsi register and manage their gTLDs. I sense a nice business opportunity ahead.

The larger issue to emerge out of the recent ICANN meeting is the coming of IDNs, such as domain names in Cyrillic and Chinese. When the leaders of both China and Russia clamor for their own native-language URLs, you can be sure that they will become a reality. This too will be a messy process, but it is safe to see we will see non-Latin URLs in 2009.

Here are two articles that provide a good analysis of ICANN’s recent announcements: InformationWeek and CircleID.

Two thoughts on Euro 2008 and Web globalization

2008-06-29T21:43:37+00:00

Congratulations to Spain for emerging on top of Euro 2008. I can’t say that I was pulling for any one team, but I would have loved to have seen Germany score a last-second goal to keep the tournament alive.

Being the globalization geek that I am, I couldn’t help but check out the home page of Yahoo! Spain, which features a localized header, shown here:

And then I noticed that the home page of Yahoo! Germany was also localized for the home team.

So who the heck was Yahoo! rooting for?

Everyone, it seems.

Which highlights a delicate issue for multinational Web sites — that of not appearing to root for one country over another. The golden rule of course is to simply treat each country equally. This is easy to do when it comes to localizing headers, but not so easy when it comes to providing equal levels of customer support, product documentation, and so on.

Yahoo! is not alone in navigating these waters. Here is Google Germany:

Interestingly, you can’t view this German page by simply entering google.de. You need to use a German-based IP proxy.

And now here’s my second Web globalization thought: Why does the Euro 2008 Web site support vastly more languages than the Beijing Olympics Web site?

Here is the Euro site, with support for 9 languages.

And here is the Olympics site, with support for just English, French, and Chinese.

I find it ironic that an event that is billed as a global event supports fewer languages than an event that has Euro in its title. Euro 2008 even supports Japanese, Chinese, and Korean even though these countries don’t have participating teams.

I realize that the Olympic Charter specifies just two official languages: English and French. And the host country generally adds its local language to the mix as well. This rule makes sense for signage, announcements, etc. But I don’t see why the Web site should support only three languages.

The argument can be made by the Olympics that they simply cannot justify financially supporting every language of every participating country. But I still don’t buy it. If Euro2008 can support 9 languages, the Olympics can and should do better than three.

Changing the face of the Internet — one ccTLD at a time

2008-06-28T21:45:50+00:00

Simon Johnson, co-founder of Domainer Income, interviewed me by phone recently on our Country Codes of World map.

If you’re curious about how the map came to be — as well as what areas of the world .me, .bv, and .aq refer to, you can listen to the interview here.

PS: Simon is based in .au.

Meet me in St. Louis (and Indy)

2008-06-16T14:40:44+00:00

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.

IDNs become a presidential issue

2008-06-16T13:52:03+00:00

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.

Apple iPhone 3G illustrates the value of a global design template

2008-06-09T22:31:45+00:00

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.

Google Adwords unavailable (in 17 languages)

2008-06-08T14:40:57+00:00

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.

The world’s most dangerous country codes

2008-06-05T15:27:17+00:00

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.

New talk slides: @media Conference 2008

2008-06-04T15:56:38+00:00

See the slides (with notes) [PDF 3.2Mb]

Richard Ishida gave a presentation entitled "Global Design: Characters, Language and More" at the @media 2008 Conference, London, UK, on 30 May, 2008. [search keys: talk-2008 talk-ishida ]

2008 Global Intranet Survey invitation

2008-06-04T13:53:54+00:00

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.

Translating numbers in China

2008-06-01T19:54:32+00:00

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.

Web sites go black in China (cont.)

2008-05-21T23:11:41+00:00

Here are some more localized Chinese Web sites that have gone black:

McDonald’s

Cisco

Intel

Oracle

Web sites go black in China

2008-05-21T02:31:04+00:00

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.

In which we point at some blog posts

2008-05-17T01:49:22+00:00

Which are interesting: The Universe of Discourse posts on language.

Google Translate is growing up

2008-05-16T02:58:11+00:00

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.

“Machine Translation” is a Misnomer

2008-05-15T23:48:55+00:00

An ickle rant ensues.

The public doesn’t understand how machine translation works. And generally speaking, the public doesn’t understand that machine translation couldn’t exist without human translators in the loop.

In other words, it’s not really “machines” that are “doing” the translating, it’s people. The machines are simply programmed to imitate the translations the people do.

I think this is symptomatic of a widespread disease in the computer world: an obsession with cutting people out of the loop.

It’s the same tunnel vision that motivated the much (and rightly) criticized footer that graced Google News at its launch:

This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors.

No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.

O’Reilly Network — Google Needs People

Admittedly, this quote has long since been removed, and it was probably only meant as a joke in the first place anyway. But this problematic attitude still underlies a lot of reactions to Machine Translation. In general, people don’t realize that it wouldn’t be possible without human translators.

Yes, the title is pretty much a joke. I do visit reality once in a while.

Poland joins the million domain club

2008-05-15T16:24:23+00:00

Poland (.pl) announced last week that it joined the million domain club by registering its one-millionth ccTLD.

The reason for the sudden surge in registrations is Poland’s easing of the registration process by adding partner registries. There are now 95 registries for .pl including 37 of these based outside of Poland.

Here’s a chart of all countries with more than one million registrations. I also included the EU in there. I did not include Tuvalu (.tv).

I expect China to surpass Germany in the next two weeks.

For the ultimate country code reference, see the Country Codes of the World poster.

Aligning translations with text compression?

2008-05-13T20:31:55+00:00

Dear ~~interwebs~~ ~~series of tubes~~ people:

Random thought:

If you have two translations, and you perform some sort of compression on the both of them, could interesting relationships between the content of the two translations be uncovered? For instance, it seems like you might be able to get rid of non-content words, which might make it conceivable to align the texts at a phrase level.

I’ve dug a bit, but only found a paper by Conley and Klein, “Using Alignment for Text Compression.” But a quick glance at that (haven’t read it yet) suggests that they’re interested in improving compression for compressions sake, which isn’t what I have in mind.

Thanks for your thoughts and observations, interwebs.

The art & science of global navigation: June 3rd

2008-05-11T20:14:10+00:00

My second Lionbridge Webinar is scheduled for June 3rd at 1 pm EST and you can register for it here.

The topic is global navigation — why it’s so important and how to improve upon it. I wrote an ebook about this topic two years ago. Since then, geolocation and language negotiation have become more commonly used and an increasing number of companies have launched splash global gateways — like Intel, which launched its first splash gateway just last week.

If I have time, I also plan to talk about IDNs — internationalized domain names — and why companies will need to register them (and may in fact be required to register them).

See you on June 3rd!

Web globalization webinar follow-up

2008-05-08T18:49:05+00:00

The Lionbridge webinar yesterday has been archived for those of you who couldn’t make it. You can register to listen to the call at the Lionbridge site.

And mark your calendars for June 3rd, when I will host a second webinar, also sponsored by Lionbridge, to discuss the many aspects of global navigation — from splash global gateways, to country codes, to geolocation. I’ll include lots of real-world examples.