About this Author
John Yunker is founder of Byte Level Research and author of the widely acclaimed book, Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies and editor of Global By Design. He has covered the emerging field of Web globalization for half a decade and has published a wide range of reports dedicated to best practices in Web localization and internationalization.
About this blog
Going Global focuses on the risks and rewards of expanding into new geographic and cultural markets, from Web globalization to international marketing to global usability.
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Monthly Archives
November 28, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Very interesting article in the NY Times today about the inner workings of Google:
The projected display, called Live Query, shows updated samples of what people around the world are typing into Google's search engine. The terms scroll by in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, French, Dutch, Italian - any of the 86 languages that Google tracks.
I've gotten a glimpse of this phenomenon because the Tower of Babel demonstration pages that I put together several months for my book now brings in people who search for "Tower of Babel" in different langauges. Near the top of the web logs are search strings like "torre de babel" and "turmbau zu babel."
Want to increase traffic to your Web site? Translate, translate, translate...
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November 26, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
The BBC has long been the global news leader. It has also invested heavily in Web globalization -- offering the news in 43 languages:
Now to give you some idea of how significant an undertaking this is, most major multinational corporations have yet to offer Web sites in more than a dozen languages. Even FedEx, with 65 "localized" sites, still only offers about 12 or 13 different languages in all. Here is the BBC's "global gateway" to all those language-specific news sites:
Notice how the BBC uses both a pull-down menu and text links. The challenge with offering Web sites in languages such as Persian, Chinese and Urdu is that you can't just assume that most Web users have the necessary fonts installed on their systems to properly view the text. Yet you want non-English speaking users to quickly see their languages represented, without having to navigate through a pull-down menu. So the BBC wisely embeds the links to these sites within graphics, so the average global user can view the global gateway properly. It's not a perfect solution - as some non-Latin languages are hidden in the pull-down menu - but it's better than most. Watching how an organization manages all those languages simultaneously provides a glimpse into the future of Web development and some good ideas today for the rest of us.
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November 25, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Ford Motor Co. is paying an ``incredible penalty'' for Britain's absence from the European single currency and its UK competitiveness will be hurt if the nation does not join, the auto giant said Monday.
``The longer we stay isolated, the more we lose,'' Britain in Europe campaign director Simon Buckby said.
Read the article.
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November 24, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Internet users are expected to number 655 million worldwide by the end of 2002. That's a 30 percent increase over the previous year, with the developing world accounting for a full third of all new users.
From the UNCTAD E-Commerce and Development Report:
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Posted by John Yunker
I contributed an article to the John Rhode's WebWord site. It's all about the importance of the global gateway - an often overlooked and increasingly important aspect of Web globalization. I'd be curious to know what you think.
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November 21, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Research International just released the results of a study on global branding. I found this excerpt very interesting:
Despite the growing need for localized positioning highlighted through the research, there are two groups of brands for which marketing that is too localized can be potentially damaging. These are either highly aspirational prestige brands (e.g. Chanel) or brands whose appeal is founded on a universal myth such as Nokia's theme of connection, or Levi's theme of independence.
This is a very good point. And I wonder if Mercedes will suffer long term when the word gets around that their "German-engineered" cards are built in Alabama.
Here's the press release.
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November 19, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
The translation industry used to have four vendors that towered over everyone else: Bowne Global Solutions, Berlitz GlobalNet, Lionbridge, and SDL International. In September, Bowne bought Berlitz, and then there were three.
Check out the article: Bowne translates strategy into growth
What I find interesting is what a tough time these big vendors are having making a profit. Everyone thought consolidation was the key to success, and Bowne went on a buying spree, as did Lionbridge and SDL. Now they have loans to pay and the revenues aren't quite what they hoped. They bought market share and then the market shrunk. Temporarily, we hope.
I am fairly optimistic about the big 3. And in many ways the industry needs a big 3 -- large firms that can pump serious money into serious advertising and PR, helping educate corporate America about the value of translation. (I can't tell you how many execs I talk to who think computers are going to wipe out the entire industry in a year or two.)
But those advertising plans are going to be on hold for awhile, at least until the bills get paid down a bit and corporate America starts spending again.
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November 16, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
I wanted to highlight a few good Web resources that I've been reading lately:
Asia Business Intelligence
This is a weblog maintained by Rich Kuslan. Rich has worked and traveled throughout Asia over the years. This is important reading for anyone interesting in this complex, emerging region.
Macchiato
I'm not sure what to call this site exactly. It's the home page of Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium and a leader of the Unicode movement. He has created a number of excellent resources for anyone interested the subject. For example, if you want to know what a certain code point translates to in Unicode, you can input the number and up pops the character. For example, someone recently emailed me a newsletter with several ’; scattered among the text, such as this example: I’ll take you . The reason the character wasn't displaying correctly had to do with my email client not understanding that this was a Unicode encoding. (Ironically, to make the & and the # display in this Blog, I had to use the ASCII named and numberic entities.)
Now, it was obvious what character was intended, but just for fun I went to Mark Davis' Unicode Charts, punched in the number and sure enough, it was an apostophe. This is how I spend my Saturday afternoons. A little frightening, I know.
Why can't they just speak English?
Lastly, this eclectic site from Michael Kaplan offers a range of resources related to localization and translation. I like the page above a lot because you can test the ability of your browser to display a number of languages at once. It's one of those rare pages on the Internet that tests the very limits of Unicode.
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November 13, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Former advertising executive Charlotte Beers, now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, is launching a $10 million ad campaign that promotes America to the Arab world. Ads are airing on television and radio in the Middle East and Indonesia.
Ads, however, are fleeting. If we really want the Arab world to understand us a bit better, we need to invest in the translation of our major American Web sites.
For example, suppose Arabs in Saudi Arabia, after having seen one of those television ads, visit the home page of the White House. Unless they speak English or Spanish, they’re not going to have much luck deciphering it. English and Spanish are the only two languages available on this Executive Branch Web site, which is more than can be said for the other two branches of government. Web sites for Congress and the Supreme Court are available only in English. From the Department of State to the Department of Justice, you need to speak English to understand what our government is saying.
While translating a Web site into Arabic may not be as glamorous as crafting an ad campaign, it costs a lot less and, more important, communicates to every Arab speaker on the Internet, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. According to the research firm Global Reach, there are roughly 4.4 million Arabic speakers using the Internet today. That figure will reach 5 million in 2003.
American businesses have already caught on to the importance of Web “localization.” A few major multinationals, such as General Electric, General Motors and Microsoft now offer Web pages in Arabic. Microsoft went one step further last year when it launched the MSN Arabia portal, available in Arabic and English.
Many more companies have localized their Web sites for various parts of the world, from FedEx offering a Chinese-language site to Lucent offering a Russian site. Clearly, corporate America, while still very much in the early stages of Web globalization, understands the need to speak the many languages of the world.
And they should, because English is fast losing its dominance over the Internet. According to Global Reach, more than half of all Internet users today are not native-English speakers. By 2007, native-English speakers will make up less than one-third of all Internet users. While English may indeed be the lingua franca of the international business community, if you want to reach the hearts and minds of the consumers of the worlds, you need translators.
Which brings us back to the government. Ironically, there is one government Web site that does make a very good effort at translating Web pages: the Social Security Administration. It offers Web pages in 15 languages – from Arabic to Chinese to Tagalog. Why? Because millions of Americans are not native-English speakers. The Social Security Administration is making itself accessible to Americans.
If the government and businesses are to make America accessible to non-Americans, they need to invest in translation. The Internet connects the world, but it is language that connects people.
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November 12, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
According to Gartner, more Europeans use short messaging service (SMS) than email. Currently, 41 percent of European adults use SMS, compared to 30 percent that use the Internet/email.
Increasingly, people don't interact with the Internet (or each other) through a traditional computer. The cellular phone has become the platform of choice in many markets. In some markets, particularly emerging markets, the phone is the only platform (because PCs are prohibitively expensive); in other markets, such as Europe, the phone is just another platform. Either way, I think we're quickly moving away from the days of looking at Web sites as collections of pages and moving toward, well, I'm not quite sure...
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| Category: Web Globalization
Posted by John Yunker
Displaying mathematical and scientific symbols on Web pages - and elsewhere - has always been a challenge due to lack of font support. That's about to change.
The folks at six organizations -- the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) -- are working together to create the STIX font, short for Scientific and Technical Information Exchange.
STIX will be compatible with Unicode, giving users and software developers around the world yet another reason to adopt this character encoding. And best of all, the STIX font will be free; it should be complete sometime in 2003. Here's whey it stands currently:
Check out the site.
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November 11, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
XML, by default, requires Unicode. Which is a very good thing. But other than that, XML is only as global as we make it.
Enter the Free Standard Group. They're working on the Common XML Locale Repository. It's a mouthfull, but a very important mouthfull:
"The purpose of the Common XML Locale Repository project is to devise a general XML format for the exchange of culturally sensitive (locale) information for use in application and system development, and to gather, store, and make available data generated in that format."
In other words, this repository will help us tag content much more accurately than "lang=jp." It's a very challenging undertaking, with no perfect solution, but necessary to the continued globalization of the Internet. And they're always looking for feedback...
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November 10, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
In Japanese, "docomo" means "anywhere," but now it might just mean "any word" as well.
NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan's top mobile carrier, said on Friday it plans to begin sales of a new ultra-thin mobile phone equipped with a 400,000-word English-Japanese dictionary from November 12.
Read the article...
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November 9, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Well, it appears that McDonald's has fallen on hard times.
According to the New York Times, it is "pulling out of three countries and closing restaurants in about 10 other nations as part of a restructuring aimed at righting its flagging fortunes."
At first glance, one might assume that globalization has backfired on this food giant. But context is everything. Despite all the gloom and doom about these cutbacks: "McDonald's operates in 121 countries -- soon to be 118 -- and has 30,000 restaurants worldwide, less than half in the United States."
I think the issue is less about globalization than it is about a business that is maturing, even in foreign markets. And maturity is a tough phase of life, even for major multinationals. And I find that American multinationals find it a bit less painful to cut their foreign operations before looking closer to home. Easier to fire people you don't see as frequently. McDonald's didn't name the countries that it was abandoning, but said only that they were in the Middle East and Latin America.
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November 6, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Want to know a big reason why Amazon is doing well these days? According to this article:
Sales rose 33 percent to $851 million, helped by growth of some 90 percent from its international sites, most of which was powered by its Japanese unit.
As a result, Amazon has just added a marketplace to the Japanese site:
The amazon.co.jp website, the fastest growing of the company's sites outside North America, said it hopes nearly a quarter of its more than one million active users would come to use the second-hand goods market service.
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November 5, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
According to Global Reach’s latest statistics on the use of language online, only 36.5 percent of the global online population are native English speakers.
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November 4, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
A few months back I wrote an article for Multilingual Computing about large translation vendors launching translation portals. I profiled Berlitz and Bowne, and right about the time the article came out, Bowne went out and bought the Berlitz translation division. I wondered if another large vendor would step in to fill the competitive void and today see that SDL has launched its own translation portal, Click2Translate.
I'm quite bullish on translation portals. They offer large vendors a chance to target smaller clients by offering lower prices (on average) than the smaller translation vendors. I'm not as bullish on the fate of smaller translation vendors. As large vendors start competing for smaller and smaller slices of the translation market, we will see continued consolidation within the industry.
Consolidation is a good thing, if you are the one coming out on top. My advice to the small players: specialize! Specialize on industry, project type, whatever. But pick a niche and make it your own. Small vendors cannot compete with large vendors on price so they need to find other ways to compete. And they will. For example, in my neighborhood there is the Brookline Booksmith, an independent bookstore that competes quite nicely against the big guys. I go out of my way to shop there, even it means paying a few bucks extra. I love the place. Small translation vendors can also compete against the big guys, but they have to pick battles they can win. And as long as we see more and more translation portals taking hold, price is going to be one battle not worth fighting.
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Posted by John Yunker
China's Internet development is expected to receive a boost in December when the .cn domain name will be made available to businesses outside China under a new liberalized policy.
According to the China Daily, there are 130,000 .cn domains registered, but it is estimated that there are about 700,000 domain names in China with the .com or .net suffix.
Read the article here.
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November 3, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
Want to irritate your Spanish and English teachers at the same time? Try a little Spanglish. Here's a recent Associated Press article...
''Language is not controlled by a small group of academics that decide what the words are that we should use. Language is created by people and it is the job of academics to record those changes,'' he said.
A recent survey by the Los Angeles-based Cultural Access Group found 74 percent of 250 Hispanic youths surveyed in Los Angeles spoke Spanglish, most often with friends, other young people and at home.
The WB network says ''Mucha Lucha'' ''lucha'' means wrestling reflects that reality. The zippy cartoon doesn't pause to translate Spanish phrases, but sprinkles them throughout to spice up dialogue.
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November 2, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
In a global marketplace, the odds of a new brand name offending somebody somewhere multiply significantly. Do your homework before taking a brand name into new markets. And read Steve Rivkin's Naming Newsletter. Here's a recent excerpt:
In August 2002, the British sportswear manufacturer Umbro was denounced as “appallingly insensitive” for naming a running shoe the Zyklon. That’s the same name as the lethal gas used in extermination camps during the Second World War.
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November 1, 2002
Posted by John Yunker
In a draft accord released early on Friday, the EU endorsed a recommendation by its executive arm, the Euroepan Commission, that the 10 candidate countries "fulfill the political criteria and will be able to fulfill the economic criteria and to assume the obligations of (EU) membership from the beginning of 2004".
The 10 candidates -- Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia -- are expected to be formally invited to join the 15-nation bloc at a December EU summit in Copenhagen and sign accession treaties in Greece in April. (more)
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