According to this article, all product warning info must be in Spanish if you are advertising in Spanish in the U.S.

Want to create a product that China will import more of than it exports? Write a book.

I thought this was a hilarious take on the world of interpreting that you don't usually see. Interpreters are usually expected to be relatively invisible, and behave like flawless machines, but they are human.

Check out the video in this blog-- it's just a PPT presentation with music from The Last of the Mohicans playing over it. Nevertheless, about 75% of it is compelling to watch if you are interested in seeing a pithy perspective on where globalization and technology are headed.

This article underscores an important fact to remember: globalization isn't a two-way street.

Canada will remove the French-language exhibit at a major military memorial after a reporter discovered it was riddled with grammatical errors, Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson said.

The article doesn't mentioned what type of process, vendor, and/or translator caused this embarrassment, but in all likelihood the department that commissioned the exhibit relied upon a so-called bilingual person from its own ranks, and proceeded to use the translation provided without any sort of indpendent, expert review.

Here is an excellent interview that details one gaming software company's expansion into the Russian market. Some of the challenges, like maintaining a high quality of localization in the face of constant updates from the development team, are challenges anyone undertaking localization of software or a website will face.

Researchers from Northeastern University in the US have developed a system for evaluating whether a food product is suitable for marketing to consumers in several different geographical and cultural markets, using an approach known as 'mind genomics'.

This is a bold proposal--will they be able to discover a food product that can truly be marketed globally without modification? Or, will the study make a recommendation that when carried out, ultimately fails, and the unsuccessful company quietly goes back to localizing its products? I had trouble imagining any food product that could be marketed globally without localizing it. Beverages like Coke are marketed in a very local fashion, and the product itself is made locally from the area's water supply. Therefore, even a very plain-labelled bottle of highly-distilled water might be unmarketable globally if it is marketed and sold it in exactly the same way in every country .

Then again, they may discover that the food product most suitable for marketing globally is drinkable yogurt.

According to recent reports:

• Denmark is the most-networked country
• Japanese is the most popular language in the blogosphere
• 50,000 U.S. students are learning Chinese in public schools
• "...there are 180 million French speakers in the world, more than there ever have been.".

"Supersize me!" is alive and well in Japan. A diet of sushi and vegetables is apparently not satisfying to many Japanese consumers.

Japan's first Krispy Kreme, which was built in December, is still drawing hour-long line ups. In the first three days of business alone the doughnut shop drew in 10,000 customers.

The Japanese still have a lot of catching up to do, though.