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.
A group of French language teachers in Japan are suing the mayor of Tokyo for saying, "French is a failed international language because it cannot be used to count numbers."
That's according to this article. If nothing else, the article is worth a read for its overview of the relative challenges of counting in French vs. Japanese.
My colleagues at Future Tense have posted an entry on a recent Synovate study on young Asians. Here's a quote from the study:
Head of Sales Yahoo! Hong Kong, Ivy Wong, said "The results of Young Asians show that teenagers rely heavily on the Internet for product and information sourcing. This reinforces the Internet as essential media for marketers who wish to reach out to this affluent group of potential customers.
According to Engadget, the iTunes Music Store will indeed open in 2005 in Japan. That would make it a total of 20 iTunes country stores, with still plenty of room left to grow.
Michael Kaplan spells out four different locale defintions. Although the definitions are quite technical, they underscore the complexity of managing locales within software applications and Web sites.
David Scott Lewis has written another great article on the lure (and challenges) of China. And if you don't speak Chinese, don't worry. David recommends getting a job with the many upstarts now targeting Western firms that have ventured into the market.
McDonald's China Web site was hacked, apparently by a person (or people) protesting the company's reference to Taiwan as a separate country. The Taiwan/China issue is bound to produce headaches for multinationals who want to offer local Web sites for each market.
Globalization services and software vendor SDL announced today that it won a 3-year language services contract from Microsoft. Although Microsoft outsources work to nearly every major localization firm, this is still a very nice win for SDL.
John Yunker is founder of 
