Globalization, Localization etc

Taken from several sources

Globalization Outline

• Bad Examples• Why Important• Issues• Principles• How to Do It – Tools, Lifecycle• WWW• Resources

Bad Examples – Excuse My French

• Look at the menus

• Look at the dialog box

• Incomplete translation !

Bad Examples – We Are the World?

• What do you mean that you don’t have a state?

• What do you mean that you don’t have a zip code?– Some other countries use “postal code”

• This is US-centric – especially if fields are required!

Bad Examples – The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire?

• The user swears that this is really how you spell customize

• Even within a given language – such as English – there are variations

• British/Australians spell a lot of words differently than we do

• More US-centricism

• Good Example – Microsoft recognizes Catalan

Bad Examples – If the Shoe Fits?

• That button fit the word “Preview”, but not “Vista Preliminar”

• Some languages tend to take more letters than others in general

• Some languages might not have exactly the right word and need a phrase

• Oh, BTW – is “Scan” a Spanish word?

Why Worry About It?

• Profits– Population

• US – 300,000,000

• World – 6,000,000,000

– Growing World-Wide Market

– Competition

– But make sure business case exists

• Public Relations

• Legal Requirements

Levels of Globalization Concerns

• Comprehensibility

• Usability

• Desirability

• These move from easier to harder

Globalization Issues• special characters – e.g. ä, ñ, ø

• Left-to-right versus right-to-left

• Date and time formats

• Numeric and currency formats

• Weights and measures

• Telephone numbers and addresses

• Names and titles (Mr., Ms., Mme.)

• ID numbers

• Capitalization and punctuation

• Sorting sequences

• Icons, buttons, colors

• Pluralization, grammar, spelling

• Culture, Etiquette, policies, tone, formality, metaphors

Principles

Culture includes …• Surface – visible – including simple things like

currency, date and time formats, and more complex – dress, family relationships

• Unspoken rules

• Unconscious rules

Format• Give users chance to express preferences for

format for – dates,

– time,

– currency,

– Numbers

– Address

– Phone numbers

Color

• E.g. sacred colors vary

• Meanings of Colors differ – see Table 10.2 on p 577

• Look out for color combinations associated with political movements

Metaphor

• GUI / Direct Manipulation approach is based on analogy to real world objects

• Danger for globalization – if the objects are not the same world-wide

• E.g. mailbox icon, telephone

• E.g. typewriter metaphor in word processing – but Japanese and Chinese rarely used

• E.g. file folders don’t look the same in China, in India, think more in terms of bookshelf, books, chapters …

Symbols• Avoid use of pictures of sports equipment, national

monuments, symbols that would be unfamiliar to members of other cultures

• Symbols meaning may be culturally dependent

• Be cautious with use of animals, religious symbols, national flags, colors, hand gestures, stereotypical people

• Watch out for cultural expectations regarding gender, racial stereotypes etc

• Avoid use of culture specific holiday symbols

• Use ToolTips to explain any icons that could be ambiguous

• Check more universal than X

• Emoticons (such as ) vary – e.g. Japanese (^_^)

Symbols

• Consider using universal signs

• Some (not all computer relevant) -

Sound

• Be careful with sounds – consider possible meaning

Legal Environments

• Laws differ from country to country

• E.g. in some countries it is illegal to directly position your product against the competition

Unspoken Rules

• E.g. Japanese find disembodied body parts unappealing (Marcus et al 1999)

Humor

• Is very culturally dependent

• May be dependent on language

• Doesn’t tend to work well cross culturally

Language• Language can greatly affect the length of text. Save room

• Modify keyboard mnemonics to fit target languages

• It is difficult to handle translation if the program concatenates strings on-the-fly as the program is running

• Use simple syntax – noun-verb-object

• Use consistent terminology – makes for easier translation

• Try to stay away from words with multiple meanings

• Visual puns may not translate

• Avoid difficult noun phrases (e.g. 3 nouns in a row)

• Avoid abbreviations and acronyms

• Avoid slang

• Avoid use of letters in bitmaps and toolbar icons

Language• Avoid overly friendly style, which may be interpreted as

condescending

• Watch out for gender, racial, national stereotypes etc

• If no translation exists in a language, use the original word

• Layout should follow left-to-right vs. right-to-left vs. vertical pattern of reading– Microsoft Windows 2000/XP localization of Hebrew and Arabic handle

right to left – but ensure that your application is “mirroring aware so that text is not “flipped”

• Sorting sequences – where special characters, such as ñ, ä, å, ë, and even the Spanish ll, fit in alphabetical order

• Remember that help files must be translated

• Microsoft translates first to German, then Arabic, then Japanese

Examples

• avoid culturally specific examples

Functional Requirements

• May vary from location to location (e.g. need for user control and initiative may vary in different cultures)

Details, Details

• When planning printed reports, consider European paper size (A4)

• Are specified fonts available for wide range of languages?

Globalization in the Lifecycle• Starts user analysis – identifying user communities and their

characteristics

• Followed with identifying the requirements – what varies – and of those, what is important/ worthwhile

• Include people internationally in feedback process– requirements determination

– Usability inspection

– usability testing

– Beta testing

• Ensure developers are familiar with globalization issues

• Ensure test team can recognize globalization problems

• Planning should specifically identify globalization impacts – to avoid surprises and cost-overruns later

• Some effort produces more globalized result than no effort

What about the WWW?• Log files can show geographical distribution of current

visitors

• Usability testing can be done without leaving home

• Can start site with language choice. E.g. http://www.yahoo.com/

• Language-specific start pages should have their own URLs

• Also provide means to specify language on other pages

• When showing times – give 1) where; 2) relationship to GMT; and 3) other known cities

• Consider bandwidth

• If e-commerce offerings differ from country to country – make sure user gets appropriate choices

Tools

• Microsoft Locales – in Windows, – “a locale is a set of user preference information related to

the user’s language, environment, and cultural conventions. This information is represented as a list of values used to determine the correct input language, keyboard layout, sorting order, and the formats used for numbers, dates, currencies, and time”

– Windows 2000 and XP support 126 and 136 locales

– Can specify user locale, input locale, and system locale

– Windows User Interface can be displayed in different languages – 90% localized

Tools

• VB, Visual C++, Java all provide some support

• Unicode necessary to store larger character sets

Localizing

• Ensure user interface text is isolated from code – put in files

• Store multiple versions of same string if used more than one place

• Avoid text in bitmaps and icons• Do not generate text strings on-the-fly• Test localized applications on all

language variants

Resources - Corporate

• Microsoft– http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/

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Resources – Corporate Consultants

• • www.amanda.com/resources/HFWEB99/HFWEB99.Marcus.html

• www.useit.com - Jakob Nielsen’s site – several pages relevant

Resources - Academic• www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1996.3/international.html

• http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff/coursenotes/CIS732/samplepro/user_interface_internationalizat.htm

Resources - Organizations

• http://www.w3.org/International

• http://Dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Globalization/

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End Globalization