Wil Tan

We launched another round of 6 languages in .BIZ on January 16th, 2008: Finnish, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Portuguese (press release).

While NeuStar already has many Latin-based IDN languages in its portfolio, one may wonder why we would bother making the Venn diagram so complicated. Just define a Latin script-based table and be done with it! Well, since we tend to take a more conservative approach with IDN, it is safer to have each language table contain only the characters used by that language proper and nothing else¹. After all, we’re here to provide value and not to make a quick buck (at least that’s how I see it.)

¹ Language is constantly evolving. Often, it is not easy trying to determine if a character used in borrowed words is well-assimilated in the culture to be considered part of the language. There are no clear rules, do we follow the guidelines from the trademark offices’ of the countries in which the language is used? Or do we follow the ccTLD registry (if we do, does it make sense for a gTLD?) Or language institutions? Thankfully, there are many great resources to draw from.

Related posts:

1. NeuStar Launches 5 New Languages for .BIZ We launched 5 new languages for IDN in .BIZ today. They are Danish (da), Icelandic (is), Norwegian (no), Spanish (es)...
2. .BIZ Korean IDNs Just Launched The second piece of news following the localization of EchIDNA into Korean is that we have just launched Korean IDN...
3. IDN in Dot Net RFP The .NET RFP evaluation report by Telcordia is disappointing because: IDN was not given the weight that it deserves; it...
4. Why Internationalize? Seth Godin’s book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us looks like a good read, especially for marketers, crowd-herders,...
5. Chinese and Japanese IDN in .BIZ I just got back this morning from attending the OASIS XRI TC face-to-face meeting in San Diego with Bill Barnhill,...

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under idn, neustar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.