Planet Web I18n

The $34 Billion Multilingual Business Conversation

2013-06-12T23:30:49+00:00

Good overall description of what's happening today in the localization industry. New, lean and innovative technology companies like Cloudwords are disrupting an industry that was stagnant and dominated for a long time by slow-moving translation vendors. via www.cnbc.com ...The innovations are enabling corporations to enter markets and disrupt many sectors that were previously unreachable. Language is the mother tongue of global business opportunity. Coupa Software, a San Mateo, Calif., maker of cloud spend management solutions, wanted to test the waters in Latin America by sponsoring a trade show in Mexico City. But finding interpreters and building in-house technology to translate the intricate code of its websites, marketing materials and social media—for a project that may not result in new business—required too much time and other resources. Instead, Coupa contracted with Cloudwords, a San Francisco-based firm whose project management software streamlines the translation process. What would have taken Coupa about three...

ITS 2.0 showcase 18 June: participate in person or online. Get your seat soon!

2013-06-12T14:07:41+00:00

The recently announced Internationalization Tag Set 2.0 showcase event in Dublin now allows for remote participation. Please register by 17 June 6 p.m. UTC. We will provide dial in details to registered
participants. The number of remote participants is limited and we choose on a first-come, first-served basis – get your seat soon!

A global look at Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report

2013-06-11T23:41:11+00:00

Mary Meeker, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, recently provided another healthy dose of data and trends, along with a number of predictions.

But the media largely overlooked the web and software globalization implications of many of these slides.

So allow me to chime in on the slides that jumped out at me.

Let’s begin with this slide:

So the “Made in USA” websites are leading the world in overall visitors. But what doesn’t get noted is that the top-7 websites average 91 languages.

That’s right, 91 languages — an average skewed heavily by Wikipedia.

Here are my language counts:

Website	Languages
Wikipedia	285
Google	145
Facebook	75
Microsoft	48
Yahoo!	47
Apple	32
Amazon	10

These “Made in the USA” websites have been “Localized for the world.” And that’s a major reason they’re so successful outside the USA.

Next slide:

Americans aren’t global leaders in “sharing” — though we’ve been unintentionally sharing quite a lot of our data with the NSA (a rant for a future day).

Now, I’m not sure how different cultures define sharing, which has to be a major caveat to this slide.

Nevertheless, the fact that different cultures share different types and quantities of information is a major globalization challenge.

This isn’t just a Facebook or Google+ issue, it should factor into the degree to which you wish to integrate social networks into your website (as well as your expectations regarding engagement). Privacy concerns could very well be one of the most significant issues of the next decade and beyond.

Next slide:

This slide is pretty easy to grasp. But a question that often comes up when looking at mobile trends around the world is “How many of X country’s mobile users are using smartphones?”

See below for the answer:

I love this slide because it helps clarify exactly how many mobile users may actually be able to browser your mobile website (or download your mobile app).

China is a significant smartphone market while Russia is not (yet).

So when thinking global about your mobile strategy, you need to also think about smartphones vs. feature phones (those that offer poor or nonexistent web browsing).

So those were the slides that jumped out me. Let me know if something jumped out at you.

The post A global look at Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report appeared first on Global by Design.

Universal Language Selector coming to all wikis

2013-06-06T09:39:01+00:00

The Universal Language Selector (ULS) provides a flexible way to configure and deliver language settings like interface language, fonts, and input methods (keyboard mappings). It combines the features of two earlier Mediawiki extensions Narayam and WebFonts. From June 11, 2013 on, ULS will be made available to all Wikimedia wikis in 5 phases.

In the first phase, ULS will replace the Narayam and WebFonts extensions on 84 wikis. User preferences from the replaced extensions will not be preserved. Affected communities will be notified by the Wikimedia Language Engineering team of the upcoming change.

In the 5 weeks that follow, ULS will be deployed on Wikipedias in size 11-20 (phase 2), all projects without language versions (phase 3), English language Wikipedia (phase 4) and all other wikis (phase 5).

The Universal Language Selector can be visible in two ways: In the sidebar for wikis with language versions, like Wikipedia, or in the personal toolbar at the top of wiki pages for wikis without language versions, like Wikimedia Commons and Meta-Wiki. Based on the geographic location of users, the initial set of language preferences is presented. Users can set the input methods and fonts to that they want to use. Logged-in users can also change the language for the MediaWiki menu items.

Universal Language Selector is already available on several Wikimedia wikis like Wikimedia Commons and Meta-Wiki. The appearance on wikis like Wikipedia is available in the beta installation of the English language Wikipedia on Wikimedia Labs. A cog icon is present in the “Languages” section of the sidebar menu. Clicking the icon opens the Language settings panel that can be used to set the display and input settings.

Please have a look at the Universal Language Selector feature description or the Frequently Asked Questions for more detailed information.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

iYouth: The battle over the next generation of tech consumers

2013-06-05T14:35:34+00:00

I love these new Apple advertisements:

And…

But one thing I couldn’t help but wonder while watching them: Where are the older folks?

That is, where are the people of my demographic? Or my parents?

If you look closely you’ll see one or two people who may be 40 or 50 years or older, but overwhelmingly these are ads starring young people.

Apple does not want to be known as that company that is only popular with your parents.

A point that Samsung is happy to underscore with this ad:

Of course, Apple is hugely popular with your parents. And grandparents. And even great-grandparents.

Which is probably why Apple is so focused on the next generation of tech consumers.

And not just American tech consumers, but global tech consumers.

The post iYouth: The battle over the next generation of tech consumers appeared first on Global by Design.

Come to the Internationalization Tag Set 2.0 Showcase

2013-06-03T21:31:56+00:00

On 18 June the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group holds a showcase event in Dublin about the upcoming Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 specification. Group participants demonstrate implementations for authoring ITS 2.0 data categories, for using them in localization workflows, and for improving machine translation or other language technology processes with ITS 2.0. Participation is free, but registration is required.

Language Engineering Development Updates and Events

2013-06-03T12:38:17+00:00

In the recently concluded development sprint, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team fixed critical bugs for the Universal Language Selector, participated in several events around the world and also announced the release of the latest version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle.

MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle and Updates to ULS

As the date for the first phase of deployment of Universal Language Selector (ULS) draws close, the team has been fixing critical bugs and testing the fixes. These included bugs related to the behavior of the ULS activation ‘cog’ icon. Significant design changes were also made on the input settings panel. Additionally, ULS has been hidden for users who do not use JavaScript on their browsers.

These updates are also part of the latest version of MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB). Besides ULS, miscellaneous maintenance bugs were fixed for the Translate extension editor. This further improves the stability of the Translation Editor – TUX. CLDR has been updated to version 23.1.

Amsterdam and Tel-Aviv Hackathons and Community Programs

Members of the Language Engineering team participated and also helped in organizing hackathons at Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. At the hackathon in Amsterdam, organized by Wikimedia Nederland, team members interacted with their peers. Besides attending the workshops, they also submitted and merged patches for various internationalization extensions. A session for automated browser testing with the Wikimedia QA team was particularly well-received in view of the upcoming ULS deployment.

At the hackathon organized by Wikimedia Israel, Amir Aharoni led the event and brought together more than thirty local participants to explore various aspects of contributing to MediaWiki projects. The full report of the accomplishments from the event has been documented by him.

Alolita Sharma presented a talk about Internationalization in Wikimedia projects at IMUG. The entire video of the talk and presentation slides are available online.

Google Summer of Code

The Language Engineering team also welcomed the 4 students who will be participating in Wikimedia’s Internationalization projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). They will be contributing to the jQuery.ime project, Language Coverage dashboard, mobile app for Translate and right-to-left support on VisualEditor.

Coming up

Preparations for deployment of ULS and extending support to the GSoC candidates during the community bonding period are important focus areas during the next 2 weeks.

For information about the Language Engineering team and our projects, please write me at runa at wikimedia dot org or find team members on our IRC channel #mediawiki-i18n on Freenode.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Five tips for successful, global web surveys

2013-05-31T15:35:52+00:00

It seems like everyone is running a web survey these days.

While I appreciate the importance of asking your website visitors what they think, too many of these surveys are poorly implemented.

So here are five tips to consider before launching your web survey…

1. Make it worth my while

I used to love to participate in focus groups. But I didn’t do it just to be nice (and get a sneak peak at new products). The focus groups paid me for my time.

On the Internet, most web surveys offer little (or nothing) in exchange for my time.

Consider this plea from Twitter, which attempts to coax you with cuteness into participating:

Facebook doesn’t even try to be cute. But, like Twitter, nothing in exchange for my time:

Why, Facebook?

Why should I give you 3-4 minutes of my time? (Or, to be honest, an additional 3-4 minutes of my time.)

I’m not suggesting you must pay people to get them to participate. But offer them something. A chance to win a gift certificate or free product is always a nice incentive.

Some surveys will tell me they want my feedback to help them improve my user experience. This isn’t much, but it’s something. And it displays an understanding that my time has value and that the company appreciates it. The New York Times does that:

And how about offering to share the results of your survey with your respondents? This too would be something of value that many of your respondents might appreciate. I certainly would.

2. Speak my language

During the production of The Web Globalization Report Card, I visited a few hundred websites. Roughly 35% of these websites featured a web survey, though only a small fraction of these websites offered surveys in the local user’s language. For example, as shown below, a visitor to the Texas Instruments Russia website encounters a pop-up survey in English.

Perhaps the company was targeting English-speaking web users in Russia, though I doubt it. Most companies simply overlook non-English speaking markets when they launch “global” web surveys.

Fortunately a few companies do invest in localizing their web surveys.Best Buy localized its survey for its Spanish-language website, shown here:

So the lesson here is simple: If you’re planning a global web survey, invest in making it truly global.

And keep in mind that localizing a survey is not simply a matter of translation. Questions may need to be completely rewritten, added or deleted.

3. Be brief

The following survey, which I encountered last year, is so text-heavy and complex that I wonder who actually bothers to participate.

And how valuable is the feedback from someone who has the spare time to navigate such a survey request, let alone the survey?

4. Don’t block navigation

As you can see below, a web survey overlay on the Siemens website blocks my ability to select a country website.

Now let’s suppose I don’t speak English and I just want to get to my country website.

Clearly, overlays are designed to not be ignored. But consideration should be given to web users who may not speak the language of the global home page.

These people are simply trying to move along to their localized websites and web surveys can be very disruptive.

5. Don’t be creepy

I think surveys that interrupt you with a pop-up when you first visit and then promise to interrupt you again when you leave the website are a bit creepy.

Most people don’t like the idea of being watched online and this feels like that — like someone hovering too close while you use the ATM machine.

And how about this one from LG:

This message implies that LG somehow knows how to get in touch with me via email or text.

I realize this isn’t the case but I’m not sure all web users will know this.

Bonus Tip: Test your survey on friends and family

Too often we launch surveys and promotions without asking a few simple questions:

Would my mom or dad bother to take this survey?
Would my significant other?
Would my child?
Would I take the time to complete it?

It doesn’t matter if these people aren’t your “target” web users. Because everyone’s a web user these days. Everyone’s busy. And everyone is encountering web surveys.

If the answers to these questions are NO, then find out how to get them to YES. Often this process alone will help you address many of the points mentioned above.

The post Five tips for successful, global web surveys appeared first on Global by Design.

Test features in a right-to-left language environment

2013-05-30T14:29:46+00:00

Wikimedia sites are facing many technical changes, like VisualEditor, Wikidata, Flow and Echo, just to name a few. As an ordinary Wikipedian, I like it very much and I’m pretty excited, but sometimes change is scary, especially for people who are working on “small” wikis. People constantly ask “Is this feature localized for my wiki?” or “Will it work properly?” and if you’re using a right-to-left (RTL) language (like Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), an otherwise great feature can quickly become a nightmare.

Sadly, it is difficult to test these features in your language before they are enabled on Wikipedia. Even if you’re an experienced MediaWiki developer, and you can install a wiki on your own server and add these features to test them, reporting bugs is hard because a locally-hosted wiki isn’t accessible to the rest of the world.

This is why we’ve set up a public test wiki dedicated to RTL languages. Wikimedians can come and test upcoming features, and see which interface messages are translated incorrectly. They can report bugs easily, communicate with other Wikimedians who are working in RTL languages, and work with them on features. Maybe you want to be sure a feature works properly in your language, or maybe you’re just curious and you want to know what Wikipedia will look like in the future. In both cases, the RTL test wiki can help you.

You can visit the RTL test wiki at http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikitest-rtl/w/ ; we have already installed some upcoming features, but if you think something is missing, feel free to contact me or Amir Aharoni and ask us to add it. This wiki uses the Universal language selector, which means that when you open it, the language of the interface is automatically set to the one your browser requests, and you can easily change it.

We hope to see you soon on the RTL test wiki.

Amir Sarabadani (User:Ladsgroup), editor on the Persian Wikipedia and pywikipedia developer

GoDaddy going global

2013-05-29T15:51:58+00:00

In this interview with Blake Irving, CEO of GoDaddy, he mentions the company’s focus on expanding global reach:

We’re localizing, globalizing and marketizing our code base which means we’re building software for specific languages and markets.

Take Spanish, for example. It’s spoken differently in places like Chile, Mexico and Peru, so we’ll make investments in currency, payment types, unique graphics and vernacular for each market we go into.

Here are the country websites currently supported:

Naturally, I’d love to see this global gateway promoted to the header (it’s currently buried in the footer).

But the website nicely uses language negotiation to make its Spanish-language website more discoverable.

If your web browser is set to Spanish you’ll see this overlay when you visit:

What isn’t mentioned in the interview is GoDaddy’s support for non-Latin domains (aka IDNs). I suspect that GoDaddy will be investing heavily in marketing IDNs around the world as well.

I’ve long maintained that IDNs have been slow to take off in many markets not because they don’t offer users value but because the ecosystem around IDNs have not been well developed. By globalizing the registration platform, GoDaddy is doing its part to improving the IDN ecosystem.

PS: This is a picky thing that drives me nuts. Is it “Go Daddy” or “GoDaddy”? I see it both ways on the home page. The Wall Street Journal uses “GoDaddy” so I’ll do the same.

The post GoDaddy going global appeared first on Global by Design.

Globalization for Whom?

2013-05-27T16:35:33+00:00

There is no doubt that globalization "can work" for poor people (or, better, for poor countries). Global integration can be a powerful force for reducing poverty and empowering people. The question of whether it "does work" is much less certain. According to Ian Goldin of the Oxford Martin School, the relationship between globalization and poverty reduction is far from automatic — and far from simple. via www.theglobalist.com Globalization today is at a critical crossroads. It has provided immense benefits, but the systemic risks and rising inequality it causes require urgent action. The failure to arrest these developments is likely to lead to growing protectionism, nationalist policies and xenophobia, which will slow the global recovery and be particularly harmful for poor people. The scope and scale of the required reforms are vast and complex. Urgent action is needed for globalization to realize the positive potential that increased connectedness and interdependency can...

Rethinking The Economics Of Emerging Markets

2013-05-27T16:04:31+00:00

In this article, written by a Chinese Journalist, the author points out some interesting thoughts about globalization and the current state of the Chinese (and other Emerging Countries) economy and demographics. The author ends calling out the fact that "People tend to follow mainstream ideology and ignore other factors". I always find refreshing when someone recognizes that their analysis will be shaped by their own ideology and, I would add, by their own class interests - using economic, financial, political analysis and terminology might give authors a patina of academicism and respectability (especially with people who think alike). A clear example in this case is when the author talks about "markets that regulate themselves", which is clearly an orthodox way of understanding (and thinking about) markets. It is surprising (call me naïve...) that the author is Chinese. Our job, as critical readers, is to be aware of what those interests...

The Big Mac Mirage and Other Myths: How the US is Failing at Globalization

2013-05-26T02:42:10+00:00

According to Bhaskar Chakravorti, the director of Tufts’ University’s Institute for Business in the Global Context, “the myth of American global market power” disguises the real failing of American multinationals to succeed around the world, and especially in fast-growing emerging markets. Despite what you might hear, he says “the US is extremely under globalized.” I would add that my experience is that Chakravorti is right - US corporations rarely try to present themselves as a local brand in other countries, while "foreign" brands are more successful doing that. A small example: did you know that Melissa, the global plastic shoes brand, is Brazilian? Probably not, and most certainly not if you are American. What would be really interesting is to hear the thoughts of a sociologist or even a psychologist about this matter - they might lack the economic insights Chakravorti brings, but they would be able to provide a...

Getting ready for ULS everywhere

2013-05-22T15:32:49+00:00

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

Microsoft Outlook now supports 32 country codes

2013-05-21T22:43:57+00:00

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.

Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 Second Last Call Working Draft

2013-05-21T15:58:40+00:00

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.

Requirements for Hangul Text Layout and Typography Draft published

2013-05-14T15:38:14+00:00

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.

Rome MultilingualWeb workshop report now available

2013-05-14T12:52:17+00:00

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.

When country codes go generic

2013-05-13T15:41:58+00:00

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:

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.

Cisco Systems: The Best Global Enterprise Technology Website

2013-05-09T02:59:32+00:00

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.

Myth #6 - Web page authors, this one's fer you

2013-05-08T12:47:29+00:00

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.

Updates from Language engineering: changes to the Language Selector, new Extension Bundle release

2013-05-08T11:02:10+00:00

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.

Input Settings from the ULS Language Settings Panel

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 to showcase upcoming ITS 2.0 standard

2013-05-07T16:37:42+00:00

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.

Apply for an internship with the Language engineering team

2013-05-01T18:52:59+00:00

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

New article: Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm basics

2013-04-29T19:14:49+00:00

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.

Join the Language Mavens!

2013-04-26T12:09:37+00:00

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 Engineering community meetup during GNUnify 2013 at Pune, India

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

Deadline for participation in W3C Workshop on eBooks & Internationalization approaching!

2013-04-24T17:31:30+00:00

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.

For Amazon (and other retailers), the world is not flat

2013-04-22T22:46:29+00:00

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.

4 new articles about working with HTML markup in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts

2013-04-22T16:47:05+00:00

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.

A new translation home page, the Maven Program and other updates from Language Engineering

2013-04-22T13:02:24+00:00

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.

The view after the user logs in to the new home page of translatewiki.net. This is currently in development.

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