The Pitfalls of Using Gestures

Ultan Ó Broin's blog post Natural User Interface Gestures. Are They Global? brought to mind a conversation I had many years ago with a Turkish-German court interpreter in Austria. He told me how judges in Vienna's court system kept misinterpreting Turkish defendants' body language. The gesture in question is the Turkish "no", which is expressed by jerking the head back, then bringing it forward; a gesture that looks very similar to a German nod of approval. The interpreter said that in one instance the judge had told him that his interpretation was incorrect, since "clearly the defendant is agreeing" with a statement the defendant had just vehemently denied.

Similarly, when I first moved to Mexico, I would walk away when my co-workers were gesturing for me to follow them because their gesture for coming (palm down, moving palm towards wrist) looked to me like I was being shushed away.

Just as gestures don't always mean the same thing in different cultures, so pictures and colors don't necessarily convey the same thing everywhere. In the West red is usually associated with danger, in Chinese culture it's the lucky color, certain body parts are considered rude in some cultures, ...

I understand how companies attempt to save money on instructions for their products by making them image-only. That way, the product -- such as the assembly-required chair I just bought for my home office -- can be sold anywhere in the world with the exact same package contents, including the instructions. All you need to do is slap a different label on the outside of the box and, presto, there is your Spanish, or Hindi, or Swedish, item. Besides, you don't need to have all these instructions translated into 20, or 50, or 100, different languages.

However, since images may have different meanings in other cultures, this approach may well backfire. I wonder how a pet-care company's all-image instructions would fare in an Arab country where dogs are considered unclean. Would the cute dalmatian licking the properly assembled pet-food station elicit the "oohs" it might in the West, or would it cause buyers in Cairo to return the product?

The moral of the story is, if a company decides to go the all-image route for their instructions (as Ikea does), it can't cut localization out altogether. Rather, localization professionals need to be involved in the design process for these instructions, so that potential pitfalls can be caught early on. No words doesn't mean no translation/localization required.

H.W. Fowler and Global English

As I am writing this, I am looking out over the remnants of yesterday's snowstorm in New York, which even closed the public schools. The park near me handed out free loaner sleds and hot chocolate to children taking advantage of this unexpected free time. I wish they did that when I was a kid!

Anyway, about language:

Henry Watson Fowler was born today in 1858. Best known as the author of Fowler's Modern English Usage, his first publication was actually a translation -- The Works of Lucian of Samosata translated from Greek into English. (The translation is available at the Project Gutenberg website). His next publication, together with his brother Francis, was The King's English in 1906 (available at Google Books, but he is most famous for Modern English Usage, published in 1926 and dedicated to Francis, who died before the work was completed.

Many of Fowler's rules for good writing established in The King's English echo modern-day advice for writers of global English, such as:
· Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
· Prefer the concrete word (or rather expression) to the abstract.
· Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
· Prefer the short word to the long.

I am struck by how often the writers of user manuals and similar documents do not follow these rules. They not only use highly specialized, abstract words, but also join sentences into paragraph-long complex structures. Many of these manuals are:
a. read by non-native English speakers (both immigrants to the U.S. and customers purchasing these products outside the U.S.), and/or
b. translated into languages whose own grammatical structures may complicate such sentences even further.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that many adults find it difficult to give clear and concise directions. While admittedly most people will not write user manuals, being able to provide clear instructions seems a useful life skill. Consider the friend who is trying to tell you how to get to her party, or the roommate trying to explain how to operate his video camera. How many detours did you take on the way to the party? Did you ever get that video camera to work?

Try this assignment from an innovative high school English teacher: "Your house guest is an for an alien from Mars. You are writing instructions for him on how to fix a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The alien has never seen such a sandwich, or its ingredients, and knows nothing of common culinary techniques. Be specific, but concise." Have a few people write these instructions, then follow each others instructions literally. The results can be quite hilarious!

Until next week,
Barbara