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
August 30, 2006
Posted by John Yunker
According to The Beijing News, via Rich Kuslan's blog, Dell lost a suit against a research institute over the fact that its name sounds too much like Dell's transliterated name.
Transliterated?
If this term is new to you, it is "phonetic translation" -- such as creating a name in Chinese that, when spoken, sounds just like your brand name when spoken in English. It is especially important that the resulting text convey a positive meaning -- or at least not a negative meaning.
Any multinational that has long-term consumer market aspirations in China needs to transliterate its name so it can better promote itself -- and better protect itself. And you can register this transliterated name as a Chinese-language URL.
But transliteration can be a very tricky business. Pacific Epoch writes briefly about this Dell suit; the two names in question certainly appear similar in English -- De Er vs. Dai Er -- but not too similar, according to the powers that be.
Sometimes a company will mis-translate as it rushes to enter a market. KFC and Pepsi have provided two humorous examples. According to this article on the art of transliteration: KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” slogan entered the China market as “eat your fingers off”. Pepsi’s “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” spent a short time in Taiwan as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead” before the F&B giant went into damage control."
Such is the crazy, complex world of transliteration and IP protection in the Wild Wild East.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: China
August 29, 2006
Posted by John Yunker
So said Disney president Bob Iger in his earnings call last month. Here’s the text…
“In fiscal 2007, we will launch a wholly redesigned Disney.com that will capitalize on the unique strength of the Disney brand and content. This is in addition to our robust entertainment offerings from our other vertical sites, ESPN 360 and ABC.com. So across our entire portfolio, we will emphasize entertainment, commerce and community. We also will continue to invest in our core Disney-branded content for television and other platforms around the world. We see increased development of high-quality branded content to markets outside the United States as an important long-term brand and profit-building opportunity for us. Creative and brand strength, the application of technology and globalization are the central elements of our strategy.”
The question is: Will Disney redesign with Web globalization in mind? The redesign stage is the ideal time for a company to craft a Web site that can scale to accomodate multiple locales and languages.
Disney has performed poorly in our annual Web Globalization Report Card. In 2006, the Disney.com site ranked 274 out of 300. Disney property ESPN faired even worse at 284. So there is plenty of room for improvement across the board.
The most important improvement Disney can make is to employ a global design template that all countries can work within. This template should be largely text based, to provide for fast-loading Web pages. That’s not to say that Disney can’t use lots of rich media; just that the global template should be optimized for speed. Currently, there are loads of text embedded within visuals for little reason other than because the designer wanted to display a specific font.
Global navigation should also be improved so that no matter where users land on the site, or what language they speak, they can easily find their way to where they want to go.
This is the time for Disney to improve its global Web strategy. I’ll keep an eye on the site and report back in 2007…
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Web Globalization
August 28, 2006
Posted by John Yunker
Perhaps I'm a curmudgeon, but I don't want to give up my old Yahoo! Web site for the "new and improved" Yahoo! that is coming -- whether I like it or not -- on September 1st.
Every day they remind me that the new site is coming, that my old site is being "retired." Makes me feel like I'm being retired.
I'm not trying to be difficult. I've tried the new site. I just don't think it's much better. I don't like having the navbar on the left side of the page. I used to be able to click on Yahoo! Sports with my eyes closed; now I have to fumble down an endless list of icons.
However, despite what I think about the new design, I do have to give Yahoo! credit for taking this design global quickly. While most companies may take up to a year to roll out a new design across all country sites, Yahoo! is off to a blistering start.
Here is the new design in Brazil...
And Korea...
China has sorta migrated over to the new design...
At least Japan is still old school.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before Yahoo! Japan meets its redesign.
As for me, I'm not giving in easily. I've got a few days left of Yahoo 1.0 and I'm going to refuse every day to opt in to the new design. No, I'm holding out until the end.
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August 27, 2006
Posted by John Yunker
Quechua is the language of the Incan Empire and is spoken by roughly 10 million people throughout South America, the majority of whom live in Peru and Bolivia.
Recent developments suggest that this “minority” language is not going gently into that good night.
Google currently supports Quechua with a localized search engine.
And it is not the only software company to support this language.
I read this morning, via Michael Kaplan’s blog, that Microsoft now supports Quechua in Windows and its Office software. It will be announcing this language support with the newly elected president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, who is an Indian. I should note that this level of support only applies to menus and commands; I don’t expect to see a knowledgebase translated anytime soon. Still, a little support is much much better than no support.
In addition, The Economist features an article on Quechua, noting that a recently elected member of Peru’s Congress is now speaking Quechuan instead of Spanish.
This high-level support for the language will help ensure that multinational companies provide support as well, a positive sign for the one of the world’s oldest surviving languages.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Business Globalization | Cultural Issues | Software Localization
August 25, 2006
Posted by John Yunker
Welocalize announced today that it had made the Inc 500 list for a second year in a row. The company moved up from 407 last year to 327 this year, with three-year sales growth of 409%.
The company announced last year that it generated $10.2 million in the first half of 2005. So that would make the company a $30 million company at the end of this year? It’s hard to say because there was an acquisition/merger in January of this year. Regardless, the company looks to be doing quite well.
UPDATE: I received a press release Friday from Welocalize announcing the completion of its merger with Asian translation agency Transco and confirming that they are now at the $30 million revenue mark. The company now has offices on three continents and a staff of 250.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Globalization Vendors
Posted by John Yunker
Bettina Speckman has created a rectangular map of the world's poputation, in which the size of the rectangle is relative to the size of a given country's population.
It really puts into perspective how big China and India are relative to the rest of the world. You can check it out here
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Business Globalization
Posted by John Yunker
UPS recently hired a Chinese market research firm to survey 1,200 “Chuppies” – Chinese, urban, middle-class consumers. What they found is good news for American companies looking to expand into this market.
Particularly good news is that this group of Chinese are embracing online shopping and credit cards. According to the study, more than half (52%) use credit or debit cards for shopping, and 40% have shopped online.
This is a long report -- you can download a copy for free here. Here's the press release excerpt that jumped out at me...
“Online shopping in China is still very new and there are many kinks still to be worked out, including simplifying payment and delivery,” said Erin Ennis, Vice President, U.S.-China Business Council. “American companies need to consider offering Web sites in the local language to increase their online sales.”
I would say that companies need to do more than consider translating their Web sites to sell goods in China. Translation is the price of admission these days.
The survey even touched on color preferences for packaging. If you're a male Chinese consumer, the study says, odds are that you prefer a blue package.
If you're female, you prefer a red package, which is not a big surprise -- red is a color of celebration; wedding dresses are in red.
But what I found surprising was how highly white ranked overall. White is typically associated with death in Asia and I had talked to a client a few years ago who found that white packaging was turn-off to its focus groups. But perhaps this is changing. I suspect that Chinese consumers are becoming internationalized by the Internet.
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August 19, 2006
Posted by John Yunker
Google Desktop began as a simple application that would let you search your computer's hard drive as quickly as it searches the Internet. And, best of all, it was free.
It still is free, but now it supports lots of little desktop applications, known as gadgets, and 28 languages, including Finnish, Turkish, and Romanian (excerpted here).
You can reach more than 80% of the world's Internet users with just 10 languages. So Google is clearly making good progress in expanding the reach of this application.
However, for those of us on Macs (like me) Google Desktop is still out of reach.
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