...which have been accused by the Chinese media of underpaying their Chinese labor.

China Law Blog pointed me to this article about an investigation into Yum Brands, which is apparently accused of exploiting its Chinese workers in the Guangdong province. This blog raises the significant point that it isn't about whether Yum Brands officials believe they are following the local wage laws or not, but whether their Chinese customers believe they are.

According to Boyé Lafayette De Mente, the key to the successful economy of Japan in the last half of the 20th century, and the current Chinese economy is the reading and application of The Art of War.

He recommends that: "foreigners dealing with China—in business as well as in political affairs—be thoroughly versed in Sun Tsu’s guidelines, particularly when it comes to knowing enough about the mindset and plans of their Chinese counterparts to anticipate their actions, and to have their own strategies and tactics ready to deal with them."

Orkut is a counter-example to stories of Google and Yahoo failing to penetrate markets like China and Japan. It unintentionally became wildly popular in Brazil.

Orkut, the invention of a Turkish-born software engineer named Orkut Buyukkokten, never really caught on in the United States, where MySpace rules teenage cyberspace. But it is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in Brazil.

According to Multilingual Search, Orkut Buyukkokten, is visiting Brazil for the first time.

The NY Times article offers the invitation-only aspect of Orkut being why it took off in Brazil, but this explanation seems unsatisfactory in light of the fact that there are many U.S.-based, invitation-only social networking sites that aren't nearly as successful in Brazil or other countries. Giving Orkut a quick look, I noticed that the interface is relatively simple, free of clutter, and all of the navigational items appear to be localized. My experience with MySpace in other languages was that of looking at an American site that was translated quickly.

I found the results of a study talked about in this post to be rather surprising. Advertising spending probably hasn't caught up to this, yet.

Online U.S. Hispanics adopt media and technology at a greater rate than the rest of the population, according to research from Yahoo Telemundo and Experian Simmons Research.

"Hispanics are heavy users of ubiquitous media and technology because they help them stay connected to what matters most to them - culture, community, friends and family - in both the U.S. and their countries of origin."

Here is another solid look at the current online machine translation landscape. I was surprised to learn that the head of Google's translation effort "spends his days feeding hundreds of millions of words from parallel texts such as Arabic and English into the computer, using United Nations and European Union documents as primary sources." This must be a rather dull job, feeding text to a machine all day!

I also have to wonder about Osborne's analogy of translations to playing chess. If it is supposed to indicate that software can never overtake humans in this particular area, playing chess probably isn't the best analogy. I think that machine translation will never overtake humans where translation is required to communicate a message that has been wrought of high creativity, humor or idiom. However, when any content that was authored in a structured fashion, or initially authored with an eye to being translated (by humans or other means), we will eventually see machine translation that approaches 90% accuracy, and likely passes any Turing test applied to it.

fiLi's world offers some SEO lessons for the Chinese search engine Baidu. I was surprised at the suggestion to use automatic translation tools to get some initial exposure in the Chinese market. Although this blog reports anecdotal evidence of this working, I wonder if the ensuing traffic is junk traffic (and sticking around to read the auto-translated blogs)?

This is an extremely cool little tool to have if you are learning another language. You can browse websites that are in the language(s) you are learning, and when you have the WordChamp reader in a frame (or you've downloaded the toolbar for your browser), you can mouse over almost any word to get a translation and pronunciation. It appears to only be capable of handling one word at a time (and is still somewhat limited in the array of languages for which it offers pronunciations, translations or both), but nevertheless, could prove to be very handy for the language learner.

Like Baidu in China, the Russian search engine Yandex (Russian: Я́ндекс) is fighting to hold its search market share against outsiders like Google.

Yandex announced today that they have acquired the popular networking sites for professionals, MoiKrug.ru.

About a year ago, Yandex signed a partnership with mail.ru, the most popular RuNet site.

Google currently has about a 20% market share in Russia.

The Russian Marketing Blog has some great posts that offer a humorous look at international advertising, new and old, from a Russian perspective. If you are marketing to Russian consumers, or plan on marketing to them, the dissection of a cigarette brand's marketing efforts should be quite helpful:

Sobranie's first ads are starting to appear in subway stations around Moscow. The image, oddly similar to Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory", depicts a cloudy field and what looks like a ficus tree tied to a golf iron, with the slogan "your style".

Sobranie Red is a mass consumer brand, with really confused positioning. On the one hand, it tries to appear premium, using icons like a Ferrari on its website, playing on its import status. On the other hand, Sobranie is priced like any cheap mid-range smoke. Anyone who has ever worked over here knows that Russians are very suspicious consumers, and don't believe in a good deal. If something is under-priced or is on sale, to a Russian it can only mean that there's something wrong with it. IKEA had to completely re-brand their clearance sales away from the notion of a "good priced deal" last year so that consumers wouldn't think that there was some sort of defect with the offered sale items.

You'll see a lot of posts at translationebuzz.com about the B2C and B2B opportunities that China presents. This is naturally due to the high volume of news articles that seem to continue to mushroom on the topic. Many journalists and bloggers are still waking up to the growing economic powerhouse that is China. However, for many people who've been focused on global opportunities for the past decade or so, China is old news. With so many business services being outsourced to Indian firms, its only natural that the employees at these firms will, in turn, begin spending their newfound wealth as consumers.

India is the fastest-growing market in Asia Pacific for international tourist spending, according to latest Visa Asia Pacific release. The economy is growing by over 8 per cent a year and India's growth rate can actually exceed that of China by 2015. The Indian economy is expected to grow larger than Britain's by 2022 and Japan's by 2032 to become the third-largest economy in the world after China and US and finally become the second largest economy after China by 2050.

Wal-mart, of course, is coming to India. Why wouldn't it? As this recent article from Forbes tells us:

Network Magazine, an Indian business publication, observes in its current issue that retailing is India's largest industry, accounting for over 10% of the country's gross domestic product and around 8% of employment. "The Indian retail industry is valued at about $300 billion and is expected to grow to $427 billion in 2010 and $637 billion in 2015," says the magazine. Only 2% to 3% of that is "organized." That is, actual stores instead of open-air markets, roadside stands and other beneficiaries of India's relaxed attitude toward urban planning.

This article is a good jumping-off point for learning more about doing business in India. While Hindi is the official language of the central government, English is the official language of trade and commerce. However, the English spoken by many Indians can be very different than the English that native English speakers are used to hearing.