Opening Up Africa
Check this IDG article on OpenOffice.org localization for three South African languages - Zulu, Afrikaans and Sepedi, plus information on Microsoft’s Kiswahili Local Language...
Michel, Muhammed and Sarkozy: spot the foreign name
Should call-center operatives reveal their real offshore names? The issue has come up in a recent French ruling to ostensibly bring call center behavior...
Albanian in Albion and other fantasies
The United Kingdom is usually roundly mocked as Europe’s multilingual dunce. And we know why. However, the UK government’s brand new MyBusinessRates website ...
Bengal Bill
The Bengal Observer reports that Bill Clinton’s My Life is being published today in Bengali, the language of Bangladesh. Interestingly the report says:
The...
Can you speak German at the U.N.?
At the weekend, e-world thinker Esther Dyson criticized the United Nations efforts to work unilaterally (via a new Working Group on Internet Governance )...
yüerowz
European Central Bank President, the Frenchman Jean-Claude Trichet, has apparently told EU finance ministers that the word ‘euro’ was being spelt differently across...
Cultural bias in taxonomies
Numerous bloggers, especially John Battelle, have picked up on David Weinberger’s dissection of bias in the apparently neutral Dewey Decimal system. As Weinberger says,...
MS owns up to locale glitches
The localization community probably knows many of the venerable multicultural screw-ups made by various web designers when targeting communities and locales they simply don’t...
Bloccitanian news
Sorry to have been abruptly off-line so long. The problem was part a sudden change in holiday plans, part connection hassles in a village...