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How long should it take to learn a language? – The Linguist – language learning should be fun

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“How to Start a Multilingual Site” (Google Webmaster Central Blog) :The Cross-cultural Connector

Have you ever thought of creating one or several sites in different languages? Let’s say you want to start a travel site about backpacking in Europe, and you want to offer your content to English, German, and Spanish speakers. You’ll want to keep in mind factors like site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization.

Site structure
The first thing you’ll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let’s say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you’d want to register a domain on the .de TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it’s more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:

1. Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
2. Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.

(Read the Whole Story)

To be read carefully, and digested! You can also lean a lot from the Comments following the post on “Google Webmaster Central Blog”). Also remember to come back here and comment

Amadou M. Sall

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10 Sites That Will Teach You How To Draw Well

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Happy July 4 :-) :The Cross-cultural Connector

Happy July 4

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Building a Global Brand on the Cheap :The Cross-cultural Connector

If asked to name a few of the world’s top brands, you might include names such as Coca Cola, Disney, Microsoft, Intel, or perhaps Mercedes Benz, Toyota, and BMW. These companies have been around for many years (35 in Microsoft’s case and 122 in Coca Cola’s) and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars establishing global brand recognition.

The Newcomer

Interestingly though, sitting at number 7 on Interbrand’s 2009 list of best global brands is Google, a mere baby at 12 years of age. Google’s rise has been fast and the Google brand has been built with little marketing in comparison to its peers.

What can we learn from Google’s meteoric rise? Google has shown us that global brands can be built quickly and cheaply using the power and efficiency of the Internet. Knowledge of Google’s service spread quickly mainly through word of mouth and is now used by hundreds of millions of people all over the globe on a daily basis.

Attempting to emulate Google’s success is a rather lofty goal. However, piggybacking Google’s position as the world’s number 1 search engine can be a very effective strategy for building global brand awareness.

Piggybacking Google

According to Internet World Stats and ComScore, 1.8 billion global internet users conduct an average of over 130 billion searches every month. Google is the world’s dominant search engine with approximately 70% market share. This equates to the potential of reaching up to 1.2 billion people and a total of 80 billion touch points per month. Numbers to make even the most successful marketers drool.

How can you use this to your company’s advantage? The answer lies in the ability to position your website for visibility in Google’s search engine results. Google ranks result according to relevancy, i.e. your site must provide information relevant to the keyword terms used and also be considered one of the most important results for that keyword term.

Are you relevant?

For international search results, language and location also factor into ranking. An English-language website will never rank well for a Spanish-language keyword search. Similarly, an English-language site designed for a US audience will be unlikely to feature prominently in the search engine results in the United Kingdom or Australia. In these cases, Google just won’t consider your site relevant.

Where does one start?

Many marketers turn first to content translation. This is a critical step but should not be the first. Before translating content, you should first understand your international audience. Where are they located? What are their needs? What are they searching for? What keyword terms are they using to acquire information?

Proper research, discovery and planning will identify the content you need to publish online in order to be considered relevant by search engines, and useful in the eyes of your target audience. Only once this stage has been completed does it make sense to bring in the translation experts. You wouldn’t roll out a major marketing campaign targeting a new market without first conducting in-depth research, so why would you skip this stage in your online marketing? (Read the Whole Story)

What do you say?

Have a great weekend!

Amadou M. Sall

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