Cindy King's International Business Blog » Foreign Lingo

Use Of Non-Latin Characters In Domain Names To Be Reviewed In November

Cindy King — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:00:07 +0000

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,ICANN, overseas a number of Internet related tasks. ICANN met in Paris last month. There were a fews interesting things that came out of this meeting.

You can read more about the results of their recent meeting from Ars Technica, here:

ICANN opens up Pandora’s Box of new TLDs

There are a few reasons why I have been following the issue of non-Latin character domain names.

My Foreign Lingo articles on submitting your website to foreign search engines are always popular.
Lately I have received a flurry of emails on Russian search engine submissions and also on how to set your computer to read foreign languages.

So, naturally I have been following the question of whether countries like China and Russia will be able to use their own non-Latin character script online. This is understandably something they are pushing very hard.

During their meeting this week, ICANN discussed the question of allowing the Top Level Domain URL’s to use non-Latin characters. There is no final decision yet. ICANN says it will submit this question for public comment and will meet again in November to discuss it further.

If you would like to know what a Top Level Domain is, this article will give you an easy explanation:

How To Organize Country Specific Content On Your Website

More On Taming Foreign Languages

Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

Use Of Non-Latin Characters In Domain Names To Be Reviewed In November

Special Notice – Foreign Lingo

Cindy King — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:00:12 +0000

Taming Foreign Languages

The Foreign Lingo page has been updated and can be accessed from the tab above.

This pages provides Tips To Get Over The Business Barriers Created By Foreign Languages.

I do not advocate that you can carry develop your international business without any foreign language skills. But there is often a lot more you can do than you think. I often see business hesitating and remaining inactive longer than necessary when faced with international business development.

If you want to develop your market internationally, you have to take action. There is a lot of international market research you can carry out now, without waiting, without any third party specialist.

Depending on your area of activity and your method of for international sales, you may need an international regulations expert. Prior international market research will help you to understand foreign markets better.

If you are a small business and just starting out in developing international sales, you will probably opt for simply exporting your product or services. Market research in each of your foreign target markets will enable you to position yourself better in those markets and make more sales.

But companies often get stuck right at the beginning and stop. These problems or hurdles are often easy to get by without outside help.

Or at least, a little further action and investigation and you will identify the right third party help you actually need.

Foreign Lingo will address the hurdles companies encounter related to languages and cultural barriers.

Do you have any questions? Are you trying to establish communication with your foreign markets and getting stuck somewhere?

Leave a comment here and I will get back to you.

How To Set Your Computer To Read Foreign Languages

Cindy King — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:33:39 +0000

Taming Foreign Languages

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause

Small businesses, or website owners who do not have the budgets for full fledged website localization, can still market to foreign cultures using little tricks to get around common cultural hurdles.

One of these cultural hurdles can simply be related to the different alphabets and “character sets”. How can you communicate with a foreign country if you can’t even type in language?

A reader emailed me today with a question on the readability of different language character sets. This questions deserves more than just a quick answer.

Here is her question is:

“We are adding Russian to our website and our usual visitors do not have Cyrillic type, thus cannot view the Russian area.
Have you had this problem with any languages and if so is there a way to solve it without using PDFs or art?”

There are two easy way out.

Using a PDF file
Saving each page as images are options

Both of these solutions allow most people to read your Russian characters. But each has disadvantages.

PDF files can be big and some users will not download a PDF.
The text in an image is just an image, so the search engines will never find it.

Installing The Cyrillic Type For Internet Explorer And Firefox

There is one thing to do first.

On YOUR page, make sure that you identify your content as being in Cyrillic.

If you don’t call out that the characters are in a different alphabet then you may see something like the following entry instead of Cyrillic letters:

::::::::::::::::::::::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;????????????????????///////////////////

The HTML code to use the Cyrillic character set (CHARSET below) is very important.

Here is what you need to insert with the rest of your meta tags above the body of your html code:

Need To Use A Different Character Set?

If you want to do this with a different character set, this is where you can get the full list of Windows Charset: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752010(VS.85).aspx

How To Set Your Computer To Read Foreign Languages

I am not going to tell you how do this on all computer operating systems and all versions of those systems.

Here are changes you will want to make on the two most common operating systems in use. The examples used are for Cyrillic.

In Windows XP

To Be Able To View A Different Character Set Such As Russian:

Go to your Control and double click on ‘Regional and Language Options’ which will open a window.
From this new window select ‘Advanced’ and a list will appear with supported languages.
From this list select the languages which match the version on of the languages that you wish to see.
At the top of the list is Cyrillic which you should select.
Lower on the list there are other versions of Cyrillic which you should also select.
In addition, it is safer to include the language Ukrainian.

If you are doing this for languages using something other than the Cyrillic alphabet, it is better to select more options than you think necessary – other people can make mistakes when defining their language.

To Be Able To Type In Russian:

Go to your Control and double click on ‘Regional and Language Options’ which will open a window.
From this new window select ‘Languages’ and then ‘Details’.
Clicking ‘Details’ will open a new window ‘Text Services and Input Languages’.
In this window select ‘Add’ and yet another new window will open.
In this window, from the ‘Input Language’ drop down menu select ‘Russian’.
The ‘Keyboard layout/IME’ drop down menu will change to Russian.

The results in the ‘Text Services and Input Languages’ will be an additional keyboard listed which you can select when typing in Russian.

In Windows Vista

In Vista there is only one process to both read and type in a different character set.

From the Control Panel select the ‘Regional and Language Options’ icon which will open a new window.
From this new window select ‘Keyboards and Languages’, then ‘Change Keyboard’, which will open a new window.
In the new window click ‘Add’ (yet another window) and from this final window select ‘Russian’.

You should now be able to type in Russian in Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and most other applications. You can switch to ‘Russian’ by either clicking on the ‘Ru’ icon from your task bar or by using Alt + Shift to select your language.

And likewise, once you have finished typing in Russian, you can switch back to English by clicking on ‘En’ or using Alt + Shift again.

In some programs such as AOL and old versions of Word (95) you will also need to choose a specific Cyrillic font such as ‘Arial Cyr’.

Easier Than It Seems

Enabling your computer to view and read different character sets will make it easier for you to do market research and communicate within that particular language and country.

Remember that other computers outside of the country in question may not be set up for those languages. To get around this problem you can use PDFs and images to transmit your message in the different character set.

This way all of your readers will be able to see your message, in Cyrillic for example, instead of thinking there is a mistake either on your website or their computer.