Choosing the first few markets to localize your website for is relatively easy: look for the ones with the most obvious market potential. A U.S.-based company may start with U.S. Spanish and Canadian French and then expand into some of the larger European and Asian …

When considering a translation proxy to localize a website, people often ask “if we change the content on the site, what will visitors see while the translators are working on the new translations?” Unless you are using machine translation as a backstop for untranslated content, …

I have a lot of conversations with Global Marketing Operations customers about global content marketing strategy. Even though it is a small world, there are many markets on this planet and you need to be strategic with your investments to reach them. …

Not long ago, I wrote a post called Planning for Localization to give tips for enabling internationalization even if localization is not part of your initial launch requirements. As I mentioned before, internationalization is one of those requirements that gets de-scoped with much regret …

If you were not able implement a host-based strategy for your Global Business URLs, you might be able to implement Google’s rel-alternate-hreflang tag. This article, Giving Google better instructions about language and country, provides a good explanation.

The basic gist is that if you are …

Localization can be an elusive requirement for a website. During the platform selection process, internationalization is often listed as a “strong” requirement. Why wouldn’t you want the ability to reach new markets? Then, during the implementation process, localizing gets downgraded as a …

Recently, I have been doing a lot of work with translation proxies. A translation proxy is a service that sits in front of your website and applies translations so that different audience segments can see your content in their local languages. You …

Outerthought recently announced version 2.2 of their Daisy CMS platform. One of the biggest improvements has been in the area of localization. Daisy, with its “variants” model, has always been strong in managing multiple language renditions of a content asset. With 2.2, …

This morning there was an announcement on the Magnolia user mailing list that the first release candidate (RC1) of version 3.5 is now available for download. If you were waiting for version 3.1, don’t worry, you didn’t miss it. It is the same release. Still, …

I have seen (and replaced) enough home-grown content management systems to know that they are not as easy to build as you would think. As a software architect, I understand the temptation. You just want something simple and you don’t want to put …