The power of context
The user experience of most content-dependent products relies heavily on translation and adaptation to the local language, units of measure, regulations, patterns of use, price, and other relevant cultural aspects.
For example, the world-renowned New York Times (NYT) is a daily newspaper with a global readership of several millions, but the web edition of the paper is available only in English, Spanish, and Chinese (see the preceding image). These are, after all, the three most common languages on Earth. In contrast, Facebook, with over a billion and a half users, has an interface that is nearing a universal support for all languages.
The difference between the New York Times and Facebook is that the first provides content, and the latter relies on users and advertisers to generate content. Both relay on Unicode, the computing industry standard for text, which was designed to handle most of the world's written languages. Unicode is a remarkable invention, of which most...
