One of our clients just approached us about translating their eLearning product into several foreign languages, including French and Mandarin. We’ve done localization before, but never into an Asian language. We started discussing costs for translation, for new photos, new recordings of speakers. We discussed some color changes, Unicode support in Flash, text-length and many other issues.
Then, someone asked, “Do Chinese businesspeople shake hands in greeting?” We didn’t know. And then the questions started flying. The course — a sales practices enhancement course — mentioned eye-contact in several places. “How do Asian cultures regard direct eye contact?” “The course instructs the salesperson to speak in particular tone of voice and to listen for those tones in the client’s voice. Do the tones of voice translate?” “Is directness of speech accepted, or is it rude?” We’d hit on some of the less-quantifiable nuances of culture.
New Architect Magazine has an article this month entitled Are You Cultured? which discusses in good detail some of the implications of cultural differences in Web and UI design.
The article draws heavily on the work of Geert Hofstede, author of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. The focus of the book
“…was not on the definition of culture as “refinement” of a people, but rather on essential patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. This makes his work especially useful when applied to site design and usability.
The article summarizes Hofstede’s five dimensions of culture, and how they apply to designing and adapting web sites for different cultural audiences.
The article is excellent, as usual for New Architect, which makes it all the more disheartening that the March 2003 issue is the last one for the magazine. It’s being folded, although the publisher is planning on integrating some of the content into one of its other magazines, Software Development. I received an email today asking for input on which columns, features and types of articles readers would like to see carried over to the other magazine. Ummm… how about all of it?