[mono]

Great article about language as the last man standing against globalism. If you ever have to manage the translation of a piece of software into a different language, you will find two kinds: One in western chars where you can get a feeling about the translators work and one in different chars like russian, japanese, chinese, arabic where you don't get a ghost of idea what is written there.

For search engines this is much harder: if you don't employ a sufficient numbers of native speakers for these languages, you will never get sufficient results. All other employees can't help you out. Translation software is useless, if you don't know how to weight the possible results from the cultural canon. A cyrillic reader expects to find the russian state library on top when looking for a lib, not the library of congress.

[ma2rten]

Just for the record: Google has two engineering offices in Russia and one of Googles co-founders is born in Russia.

[TomorrowMars]

does it mean they concentrate on the Russian market? Hardly.

[redthrowaway]

Gabe Newell had an interesting take on this. [1] He was mainly talking about piracy and why it was so prevalent in Russia, but his point was that American companies are generally pretty terrible at localization. The reason Russians pirated as much as they did was that the crackers made much better localized versions than did the game companies themselves.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87pevh2Q0hg&feature=playe...

The entire interview is great, check out the first part here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3xHJ_vhAkc&feature=relat...

[TomorrowMars]

!!!! Exactly! if you don't employ a sufficient numbers of native speakers for these languages, you will never get sufficient results. All other employees can't help you out. Translation software is useless, if you don't know how to weight the possible results from the cultural canon.