Another wildly popular community website in the U.S. expands into China, by acquiring edodo.com. What's most interesting is, of course, the large numbers that always come up when talking about potential markets in China.

The eDodo acquisition in China moves Match.com into an emerging online personals market with unparalleled opportunity for growth. There are more than 64 million online singles in China, and the iResearch.com market forecast projects that the online dating category will nearly double in 2007.

The blog GOOD EUNGLISH raises the cry for complete and instant translation between all of the EU languages. The solution proposed at this blog seems to be rather ambiguous and naive, considering the current amount of money the U.S. government is dumping into machine translation to improve it for defense communication purposes. Still, it is plausible that the collaborative aspect of the EU machine translation initiative will prove more successful than a purely technological approach.

For a company that is usually touted as being ahead of the game when taking its site and offerings global, this story smacks of a lot of shortsightedness, more symptomatic of other U.S. companies attempting to penetrate the Chinese market. If what the two articles below say is true, Google waited until after it was offering its Gmail in beta to the public before tracking down the owners of gmail.cn, rather than seek out the purchase of this domain while Gmail was in the R&D phase. (I am assuming, of course, that Google spent at least eight months researching, developing and branding Gmail before releasing it to limited public use.)

A legal source told Reuters that Google was trying to buy the Internet domain name, held by Beijing-based ISM Technologies.

It resembles Google's internationally known e-mail service, gmail.com, and the colors in which the two logos are written are similar. The ".cn" suffix is commonly used for Chinese domain names.

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At first glance, it’s easy to assume that the Chinese site is just a knock-off of the better-known Google email service. There’s just one problem: ISM claims that its Gmail service was here first. And there’s evidence to back up that claim.

For example, ISM registered the gmail.cn domain name on Aug. 1, 2003, according to whois information provided by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which oversees the .cn top-level domain. That registration date predates Google’s April 1, 2004, announcement of its Gmail service by eight months.

***

According to Wang, Google approached ISM about its use of the gmail.cn domain and the Gmail name in August 2004, shortly after Google launched its own Gmail service in the US. Those talks didn’t go anywhere, and the two companies are no longer in contact, she said.

It is somewhat surprising to see an article still asking this question, however, the professor in the article touches on something important--the mercenary aspect of wanting to learn about a new culture and its language(s) will always find itself better served when one is doing business less as a foreign entity.

Link said that about 80 percent of the application essays for the Princeton-in-Beijing program, which he directs, indicate that students are interested in China's booming economy and business opportunities.

"That's a bit disappointing," he said, "because there are so many other very good reasons, like history and food and art and poetry and the people." But some students whose "original attractions [are] often mercenary do learn about the culture as well," he said.

Link's focus is on Chinese language and culture, and he aims to impart his passion to even the most business-centric students. "Do I try to pull students in a certain direction? Yes," he said. "I try to pull them deeper into the culture and study of the language but not away from being a banker if that's what they want."

But, he said, "a diplomat who knows something about [the culture] of China and a journalist in Beijing are going to be a better diplomat or journalist than someone who doesn't."

I'm not surprised at the language selection here, just surprise that other languages were not included in the translation as well. Will the focus of oil and gas terminology translation become primarily Russian and Chinese?

Indeed, when world energy leaders gathered in Houston last week to dissect industry issues, their remarks were translated from English into only two other languages -- Russian and Chinese.

Daniel Yergin, chairman of conference sponsor Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said the language selection "just reflects the force of globalization." So did the delegates' list: 55 countries were represented at the influential energy conference, including a large contingent from Russia.

Is this article about American preferences for movie fare indication that there is an openness to other forms of media and entertainment that is first offered in a language other than English?

If more proof is needed that global borders are being wiped away in film, one needs only to watch tonight's Oscar broadcast. With numerous nominated movies produced multinationally, set in far-flung locations and spoken in polyglot, Hollywood looks more willing than ever to break from domestic chauvinism and embrace a view of the world as an actively integrated place.

Common Sense Advisory (CSA), the leading business consulting firm in the translation and globalization arena, came to town yesterday to give two workshops on Web Globalization and Translation Technology. Ben Sargent, their Senior Analyst, gave us a solid overview of trends in Web Globalization before getting down to specific descriptors CSA has built to readily tell what type of web globalization needs a given company will have based upon its product and service offerings, as well as how it has chosen to expand into the global arena.

These are good yardsticks for companies to use to determine how to efficiently manage the globalization of their websites. While it may seem that a no-brainer that a centralized, streamlined approach to content management and translation management is the best way to go, a lot of companies often opt at first to allow their regional and in-country partners to perform the lion's share of the translation and development of the regional websites. This might seem more cost-effective in the short term, because the corporate office is saving money initially on developing international content and deploying multilingual content. However, as Sargent showed us, this approach soon eats into the time of regional salespeople, who find they are authoring or translating new content as much as a quarter of their time, instead of selling.

The second workshop, Translation Technology, provides a great overview of the landscape of current Translation Management System (TMS) offerings. Sargent provided useful comparison of a variety of current systems that are deployed to automate the multilingual content workflow process, and connect to existing content management systems. If you are in or near any of the following cities in the next few months, and are looking to better facilitate your company's web globalization processes and technologies, it is well worth the low cost to attend.

Upcoming CSA Web Globalization and Translation Technology Workshops

• San Diego, California -- March, 2007
• Phoenix, Arizona -- March, 2007
• Vancouver, British Columbia -- April, 2007
• Portland, Oregon -- April, 2007
• Raleigh, North Carolina -- May, 2007
• Atlanta, Georgia -- May, 2007
• Toronto, Ontario -- June, 2007
• Detroit, Michigan -- June, 2007
• Salt Lake City, Utah -- June/July, 2007
• Denver, Colorado -- June/July, 2007
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- to be announced, 2007
• Washington, DC -- to be announced, 2007

It looks like Google has begun building its own human-assisted terminology database by relying on users to improve upon its statistical machine translation. While one of the comments to this article at gSpy is correct that Google is late to the game in this arena, Google carries the weight of sheer visibility along with all of its other obvious assets. By virtue of having millions of extra eyeballs to improve upon and provide better translations, it could conceivably rise quickly to the top as a leader in this sort of technology, assuming it leverages the edits made to its machine translations well enough.

The NASCAR racing circuit and the markets that are driven by its fanbase are the last places you would expect to see the widespread impact of globalization. The nascar.com website appears to still be in English-only

Check the garage area where drivers and their teams work. Jeff Gordon's racing helmet? The tag says made in Japan. Kyle Busch's uniform was made in Italy. Colombian-born Juan Pablo Montoya -- himself a reflection of the sport's globalization -- wears racing gloves and shoes made in China.

Hendrick Motorsports engines use spark plugs made by Bosch, which is based in Germany. Samsung, headquartered in Korea, is a sponsor on Jeff Green's car. Malaysian-made radios allow the Wood Brothers to communicate with their driver or each other.

NASCAR reflects the overall global economy. The Ford Fusion production car is built in Mexico, and the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Dodge Charger are assembled in Canada. The Toyota Camry? Made in Kentucky.

The question of language extinction comes up quite frequently as technology and communication infrastructures have rapidly made inroads into regional language populations. What do you think? Should humans bother preserving languages as the globe gets smaller, or should we all speak variations on the top three or four that rise up to be the most oft-used? Or, will new subcultures emerge to create and evolve completely different languages from the top three or four?

This article poses the question and argues that it does matter.

This article argues that it does matter in a much more practical, scientific way:

Many animals and plants threatened with extinction could be saved if scientists spent more time talking with the native people whose knowledge of local species is dying out as fast as their languages are being lost.

Potentially vital information about many endangered species is locked in the vocabulary and expressions of local people, yet biologists are failing to tap into this huge source of knowledge before it is lost for good, scientists said.