Fergie's Tech Blog

How to Check the WHOIS Record of an IDN Domain

Jay Westerdal offers some great advice over on the DomainTools Blog:

Have you every wanted to check if a domain was available for a common word for phrase in a different language. Asking us how to do a whois lookup on an IDN domain name is actually a common question in our support ticket system.

So I thought I would let the world know how to do it. Perhaps you want to look at the whois record for “world map” in Korean. Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to do it.

1. Head over to Google Translate.
2. Enter in your words, such as “world map”.
3. Select the language you want to translate into. Example: “English to Korean”
4. If your results look like, “????”, then you need to install a language pack for your operating system. On WindowsXP it is really easy, just follow these instructions for the Microsoft Language Packs on Microsoft’s website. You can enable this from your control panel in a few minutes.
5. Once you have the translated words and it will look like a foreign language and it can be copied and pasted it into domaintools search box. Then the last step is to append “.com” to it. Then hit search and it will auto-translate it into the IDN script.

posted by Fergie @ 11/14/2007 07:05:00 PM