Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I got some more positive feedback on the global IA workshop :)

“I took your workshop and enjoyed it - I was able to apply some of the insights the day I returned to the office in a meeting.”

The global IA workshop at the IA Summit turned out great. There were 17 people, from all over the world, and we had some great discussions. We also had a follow-up round-table which was fun too. I’ve embedded the entire deck below. I’ll see if I can get the content of the handouts out here too, although that might take a while.

The feedback from the workshop was good too. Some quotes from the feedback forms:

“The session was more fun than expected.”

“A much needed, excellent presentation with great documentation.”

“Great pace with great slides.”

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A quick promotion for my global IA workshop at the iA SUMMIT 2008 - it’s shaping up to be the most in-depth workshop I’ve ever given, in a field that’s so new that the wheel is being invented again and again all over the place. I’ll post some more info on the coming weeks.

Leap seconds. Like most categories, it turns out the second isn’t as stably defined as you’d think.

Categories are cultural,
locales mix up,
structure mostly translates,
global standards have local exceptions.

More on Dewey Decimal and its biases.

The “Slums” Of Search: about search results in non-US markets.

The rise of Indian English

winterson.com: episode iii, the backstroke of the west: what happens when you cross-translate.

Craigslist rocks (and for reasons similar to why eBay rocks), but their internationalization approach has a serious flaw, which I think is responsible for their limited success in many international markets: they don’t localize their taxonomies. I’m not gonna write a long post, but here’s a quick analysis I did of their Dubai site:

As you can see, many categories just sit there empty (the red dots), and only a few categories are active (the green ones). For the original Sanfran Craigslist, the screenshot would be full of green dots.

The result of this approach is that the site feels empty and inactive. The solution would be to remove most categories and build local specific categories. For example, “woman seeking woman” isn’t particularly appropriate in Dubai society. Construction is booming on the other hand (foreigners cannot own property in Dubai itself, but clever businessmen as they are they have started building multiple artificial islands in the sea where property *can* be owned by foreigners), so one of the few active categories is “real estate for sale”, and there could easily be more real estate categories (like “offshore real estate”), specific to Dubai.

Google maps shows India in English, Thailand in (?) Thai. Curious, for some reason I wouldn’t have expected it to be localized like that.

I’ve been playing around with different diagrams that attempt to explain the various locales on a website. Here is an example:

Does this make sense as a diagram? Does it help you understand?

Language codes: “Some of the most heated discussions on the request for new projects
are about the status of a language; is it a language a dialect and
often the arguments are of a political nature. The inclusion of
languages in the ISO-639 has been political in the past. With ISO-639-3
many of these arguments have an answer with the many new language codes
that have been created.”

There seems to be a theory that the busyness or clean-ness of websites is related to the personal distance (the “bubble”) of the culture that the website is for.

Names in the world: Icelanders prefer to be called by their given name (Björk), or by their
full name (Björk Guðmundsdóttir). Björk wouldn’t normally expect to be
called Ms. Guðmundsdóttir. Telephone directories in Iceland are sorted
by given name.

In Korea, Google features animations on it’s famously understated homepage! http://www.google.co.kr
(via)

http://www.w3.org/International/planet/ aggregator for i18n posts.

Languages of the world. With a cool language map.

When you think about which locales to choose, and which languages to translate in, I always recommend to think of locales as markets, not as languages. That way you focus on the right things when choosing locales. But still, I’m trying to improve my understanding of how to select locales. What are the things you consider when choosing which languages to translate your website in? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Hey, Google translate is like Babelfish (translate text or pages), but it also can translate search results. Cool, Babelfish hadn’t had a competitor for too long.

Stephen Arnold’s list of international search engines.

ITS, the Internationalization Tag Set has been published as a W3C Recommendation.

ITS is a set of attributes and elements that are designed to help the internationalization and the localization of XML material.

For example, the same way you can use <p xml:lang=”es”> to specify a the content of the <p> element is is Spanish, you can now use <p its:translate=”no”> to indicate the content of <p> should not be translated.

Would it be fair to say that when coorporate blogging fails, it does so most often because of the cultural problems? The coorporate culture doesn’t allow for the free flow of ideas, hence the “blogging” effort becomes nothing more than a news channel, and the whole point is lost.

When it does work, it’s because it supports an existing culture of openness. True? (ps: I know the comments are broken..)

a 3mb file with supposedly ALL the worlds cities & towns with geolocation.

A smart post by Jorge on his new culture blog: “One method I’m exploring for studying other cultures more objectively
is to focus on a single “alien� element that the other cultures (and my
own) share in common, and then try to understand the ways in which they
engage with this element. I call this alien element a “bogie�.

A UK think tank has reports on where innovation will come from in the future, you can download the PDF’s on Asian innovators. Interesting stuff.

Another note on editing interviews: with English interviews, I can increase the playback speed to 1.5, in Spanish interviews (my Spanish isn’t as good), I can’t, I need to play things at speed 1.0 to understand everything.

The 5 smallest countries in the world. Vatican City is the size of a golf course. I always felt one of the reasons the Catolics became so powerful is that they pulled off starting their own country (in 1929, in a deal with Mussolini). What other religion can say that?

Of course, their first pull to power was to act as a multinational and own property worldwide. That tends to make organizations long-lasting (I have this plan for a whole book on why organizations/ideas become long-lasting or not, and the catholic church would be a great case study). But then they pulled of the country. Pay yourself taxes. Make your own laws. Plus, all power in the country is centralized in a dictator (the pope has legislative, executive and judiciary power). It’s brilliant.

Pixelsoup—jaded Pixel weblog: interesting approach to translation: let the crowd do it.

P.O.V. - The Tailenders . Behind the Lens. Filmmaker Interview | PBS: “The Tailenders” documents Global Recordings Network, which is an organization that has the goal of translating Bible stories into every language in the world. The organization use low-tech hand-wind players to distribute those recordings. And the film follows them going to the Solomon Islands, India and Mexico as they make translations and distribute them.”

Just saw this movie, very interesting.

MySQL AB :: Unicode and Other Funny Characters: “Sorting strings is a common action to take, but on top of not everyone using the same characters, not everyone even sorts the same characters the same way! A collation is a defined way of sorting strings, and it is often language-dependent. “

peterme.com: Fujita-san: “A couple days ago she came to me with a print out of this database record. It turns out the subject of that record, Santaro Fujita, lived in our house in 1942 (though we don’t know if he rented or owned.)

What will sadly not surprise you, if you connect a Japanese name and the year 1942, is that the record is evidence of his relocation that year to the Central Utah Relocation Center, but not before being housed at the race track in Tanforan (San Bruno, California). As in, horse stalls converted to barracks. (You can download a Powerpoint presentation featuring photos of Tanforan.)

Look again at that record. That such a reductive, factual presentation of data can stir up such sadness is a bit shocking. Fujita-san was no recent emigre. At the time of his relocation, he was nearly 60 years old, having lived in the United States over 40 years. The idea that our government considered him in any way a threat is dismaying to a remarkable degree.”

WorldNetDaily: Arab airline hijacks kids of ‘South Park’

Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 2: On Language and Tagging: “The first is that we are using automated language analysis software (based on languid), and it may have bugs, thus over or undercounting a particular language or group of languages.”

Joho the Blog: Karl Rove would sing in Spanish: “The immigration bill has turned into a fiasco, leaving the Republicans as the party that would build a wall between two countries — a wall! — and forcing the President to have to clarify his party’s position by saying that, no, putting 12 million people on deportation trains probably isn’t such a practical idea.

Then our President is forced to take a stand on a symbolic, wedge issue: Does the national anthem have the same value if sung in Spanish? Karl Rove would not have let the President get backed into that corner. And once in the corner, he would not have let Bush snarl his way out of it. How can the president of country of immigrants find our national song less beautiful sung in the language of those citizens who have chosen to come here? Why does it make him frightened — I do believe fear is behind this reaction — instead of bring a lump to his throat?”

All this chittah-chattah: “When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for yourself from a drop-down list. A few of the choices, in addition to the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, and Dr, are: Admiral, Air Comm, Air Marshal, Al-Haj (denoting a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), Archbishop, Archdeacon, Baron, Baroness, Colonel, Commander, Corporal, Count, Countess, Dame, Deacon, Deaconess, Deshamanya (a title conferred on eminent Sri Lankans), Dowager (for a British widow whose social status derives from that of her late husband, properly used in combination with a second honorific, such as Duchess), Duchess, Duke, Earl, Father, Frau, General, Governor, HRH, Hon, Hon Lady, Hon Professor, JP (justice of the peace?), Judge, Khun (the Thai all-purpose honorific, used for both men and women), L Cpl, Lt, Lt Cmdr, Lt Col, Lt Gen, Midshipman, Mlle, Monsieur, Monsignor, Mother, Pastor, Petty Officer, Professor, Senor, Senora, Senorita, Sgt, Sgt Mjr, Shaikha (for a female shaikh, or sheikh), Sheikh, Shriman (an Indian honorific, for one blessed by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, wisdom, luck, and other.”

uiGarden.net - Weaving Usability and Cultures: Practicing Usability in Hong Kong: “Here at the uiGarden, we have been having discussions on whether there are cultural differences between practicing usability in the West and the Far East. In an exploration of the theme, we interviewed Apogee’s own Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong. They give their own uptakes of the discussion and offer us their insights from their own experiences of working in Hong Kong.”

I was just at an anthropology conference where they were talking about the importance of the race/gender/… of the interviewer vs. the interviewee. A black lady said: “When I was interviewing in Africa, people told me they opened up to me because of my color and grey hairs”. The discussion was interesting, it made me think of the importance of a diverse team. In web development, usually everyone is white male, and I think it shows in the systems we build.

Joi Ito’s Web: Japan’s “Free Press”: “I heard an interesting theory that I’d love for any Japan experts to confirm or debunk. Apparently, during the drafting of the Japanese constitution, the phrase “freedom of the press” was proposed by the US team. This was a big problem for Japan which had never really allowed any free speech. Instead of translating it as “freedom of the press” in terms of free speech they changed the meaning to freedom of “printing press” sort of press.”

USATODAY.com - Google’s hidden payroll: “Because Adsense earnings can vary widely depending on a site’s traffic or subject matter, many Web publishers in the developed world don’t bother participating. Whereas a $25 monthly payout may not be worth the trouble to a blogger in Manhattan, it can mean the world to a blogger in Manila.”