Recent posts in my Localisation Category
September 23, 2011
“Navigating the Digital Spice Route” - Terry Ma at EuroIA 2011
Over the course of the next couple of days, I’ll be blogging my notes from the sessions at EuroIA in Prague. Not necessarily, it must be said, in the right order. I’m starting with my notes from a session that has just finished - LBi’s Terry Ma talking about localising web design to compete in the Middle East and Asian markets.
September 3, 2008
Mac users very unwelcome at the Google Chrome download party
The blogosphere is awash with early reviews of Google's Chrome browser, but, as a Mac user, I've been struggling to get hold of it - and not just because the Mac version is still under development. Initially, Google detected that I am in Greece, and so presented me a Greek welcome page for the Chrome download - full marks there for product localisation at launch. However, once I switched to English I found that Google had also detected I was...
March 5, 2007
T-Mobile hot-spots in Austria suffer from poor translation
I posted earlier about my experience of using a localised survey product at Salzburg's airport last week. Whilst I was there I also bought an hour of internet access via a T-Mobile hot spot, and experienced a little glitch in the English translation of the Austrian version of their service. I was quite happily browsing away, when my copy of Firefox was brought to a halt by an urgent dialogue box. Your time has run out! The thing is,...
Patchy interface localisation in Salzburg Airport's touch-screen customer satisfaction survey
I had to travel briefly to London on business last week, and the first leg of my journey, from Salzburg to Frankfurt, was a bit delayed. That gave me time to explore Salzburg Airport's customer satisfaction kiosk. The departure gates have a touch-screen information point, where you can rate your airport experience. It offers a choice between German language and English language, and was one of those applications that displayed the importance of getting the little details right when...
September 21, 2006
Erratic search quality on Google Earth
Last week I was saying unkind things about the Yahoo! Maps coverage within their Flickr geotagging application. I try and be even-handed wherever possible, so I thought this week I'd gripe about Google Earth. I find the application really easy to use, and the quality of the images of the places where I've looked at has generally been excellent, but I find the search facility painful - particularly when I'm looking for places in Crete. The search algorithm is very...
August 31, 2006
The New York Times and geo-location of internet users - what I might have said on Radio 4 yesterday
So you very nearly heard me on Radio 4 yesterday talking about the attempt by the New York Times to block UK readers from accessing a story published on their website about the recent terrorist arrests in my home town of Walthamstow - "best known for its faded greyhound track" as the article states. Sadly we couldn't get a good enough line on either of my phones out here in Greece to put me on air in the end. They...
August 11, 2006
Terror plot kills local news on the BBC News homepage
Yesterday's immense security operations across the UK to foil a suspected bombing plot were no doubt one of the 'surge events' that I talked about the BBC's homepages having to cope with when I was writing on the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition blog. It was interesting to see how the BBC's new personalised web 2.0-ish panels on the UK edition homepage degrade - with a message that "Postcode options for local news temporarily removed from this page due to traffic load. Sorry...
May 15, 2006
Google.co.uk in Greek
Now that I have moved outside the UK I have more of an interest than I used to in the successful localisation of products. I came across a strange one I wasn't expecting the other day. I am doing some research on search in the UK, so have been specifically requesting google.co.uk. However, because I was in an internet cafe using a Greek installation of Firefox I got this page - Google.co.uk in Greek. Firstly I was surprised that there...
May 13, 2006
Localisation comes to coComment
Well, coComment are not letting the grass grow under their feet. When I wrote about the service a few days back, I was told that localisation was in the pipeline, and in the last couple of days they have launched German, French and Spanish localisations of the service. Following the advice left by one of the coComment team in my comments, I started using the Firefox extension - which works really well and overcomes my inability to remember to click...