Google News Prints and Localizes All the News That Fits

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Global Watchtower

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Posted by Donald A. DePalma on December 7, 2006 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization
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Google News offers Spanish speakers in the U.S., Mexico, Spain, and other hispanohablante countries named sites for news. We took a snapshot of the different Spanish-language news sites to see what's different and the same:

All the sites use the same flavor of Spanish for navigation, showing no particular Iberian or Latin American bias. The Spanish is of uniformly good quality.

The menus are the same from site to site, indicating common templates -- that's a good practice.

Following the 24-hour news cycle that drives every outlet, it's no surprise that all the Spanish-language sites draw from that day's pool of stories. The big difference is what comes first in the 20 or more bylines on a given page -- they're always the same stories, but they draw from different in-country and international news outlets.

What other lessons can we learn from Google Spanish-language news?

Use common templates. Our research into international corporate portal design showed that companies worldwide use the same two-dimensional palette.

Employ technology. Google uses robots to build the pages and has automated the process. The Google page shows that ranking the sources according to local relevance makes the content more appropriate.

We also poked around other news sites besides the Spanish-language ones. We noticed that:

The Brazilian and Portuguese page structures are very well localized. For example, the Sports section in the Brazilian version is "Esporte," while readers in Portugal will see "Desporto" reflecting common lexical differences for which you need to budget when dealing with these two Portuguese-speaking countries.

Most of the country names are in the actual languages. Non-Latin country names have English in parentheses, even in other language pages. If we wanted to be picky, we could say that on the Portuguese page "Japan" and "Korea" should read Japão and Coréia. Finally, Arabic is the only language listed versus individual countries for all others.

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