Working for International Web Standards
Henny Swan on the Web Standards Project (WaSP) posted a thought provoking article on Web Standards in China. It’s easy to get caught up in the mental box that everyone in the world is of Anglo origin, speaks perfect English and shares a historic socio-political heritage. The challenges for internationalisation and accessibility require us to leave that box. The truth is that most of the world is not us, if you’re another Anglo. US in the big sense has become a global audience with hundreds of languages and dialects, with the added complexity of conflicting cultures.
If we really want to get passionate about web standards and producing quality products in the web environment the conversation has to be initiated about internationalisation and ways we might overcome these global audience limitations.
In Henny’s post she points out some huge barriers to the adoption of web standards in China including 95 per cent usage of Internet Explorer 6, most ecommerce sites rely on Active X, and the Chinese have a lack of high quality translated resources for web standards developers to reference. All valid. Another large part of that issue is the cultural and semantic differences between the language and people, which means not only literal translations of websites and resources but also some low level repurposing. And, when you really think of it, these are also subject to political oversight – consider John Oxton’s Joshuaink a few years ago. Web standards resources may not all be smiles and culturally polite cafe conversation.
An interesting facet of how we can deal with Chinese web standards is through the expatriate Chinese communities. In Australia, for example, Chinese is the second most spoken language (in general terms). Do these communities develop websites? Are we already working with them? Do they blog in English, Chinese or both? As a catalyst this would be my considered focus for promoting web standards development in China.
Rather than simply interpreting Zeldman or Celik or Shea.
These communities understand dialect, culture and share family bonds to a degree we could never offer. The multicultural societies we exist in, recognised for the resource they offer, can provide much of the answer to Henry’s post. We have to stop looking past other cultures within our society and embrace the idea that internationalisation and localisation are a part of the web right here. The world isn’t out there anymore. A combination of multiculturalism and the World Wide Web have brought everyone to everyone’s doorstep.
Please, pull off your culture-blinkers and look around the streets of whatever city or town you live in. Look at the people you work with and the faces in elevators. Drop the boxed idea that we’re all Anglo, or European. Many are African, Asian, South American. So if our own societies are multicultural then why do we keep ignoriing internationalisation in our everyday work? The 2001 Australian Census [PDF 19KB] identified that 66% of people in Sydney spoke only English at home. Leaving 34% of the city primarily speaking non-English or at least being bilingual in their own comfort zone.
So the issue of promoting web standards in China has a wider question attached to it. How, as web standardistas, do we promote this idea that the websites we build for a local audience also need to serve an internally international audience? And how do we interconnect that internally international audience with their own cultures to spread those methodologies they’re adopting? Because, as I mentioned, simple literal translations are difficult. We have different business cases and value systems. Authentic Chinese / Indian / international writers need to be pushing the information out.
Richard Ishida’s @media 2007 presentation Designing for International Users: Practical Tips (available for download as audio and with accompanying slides) presses a few of the complexities that translation involves. But, and this is just my opinion, this shouldn’t be about us translating for them. Translation? Our immigrant populations need to be included in our heterogenous social networks. I say it again, we need to step out of this box we inhabit that insists that society is like us… that paradigm is letting us down.
For web standards to push resources into China, and elsewhere, we need to utilise the natural bridges of information scent within our reach. Long journeys start with small steps.
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:41 am
Hi Steve,
Many thanks for further pushing the article about China and spotlighting the issues in a wider context – or should I say a narrower one – namely our own.
What you say is absolutely right and we should be thinking about cultural differences within our own countries and working with people to better understand internationalization and localization.
+1 on everything you say. Small steps amount to big ones and it’s about time that localisation and cultural differences on the web had a bit more discussion attached it it.
Cheers, Henny
BTW It’s Henny with an ‘n’ and I’m not actually a bloke. Strange name I know
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:12 am
Oops
Apologies Henny, it probably says a lot for my natural attention span. I’ve fixed the Henry references in the post.
One of the frustrating things about the internationalisation / localisation issue that hits me (because this is one of my personal bugbears) is that everyone cops out in the first sentence of any conversation saying it either doesn’t relate to their audience or is too expensive to implement. But, regardless, we live in a globalised world now and the monoculture we match to this mental model doesn’t fit with what we see in the street anymore.
I’m particularly disappointed in government in this aspect. Here, at least, they only want to know about articulate western educated professionals and everything else falls right off the radar (just described their managers, no?).
So it’s kind of funny that we’re all sitting on these cultural (valuable) resources and our own monoculture mental mismodelling blinds us to it.
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:15 am
Maybe some version of the Web Standards Cafe could be very handy locally in that they could specifically aim to address this bridge between the Chinese community here, for example, and the web standardistas in China. That would be an interesting conduit for resource distribution.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 am
Steven, thank you for posting this. A very good article by Henny indeed.
Being a Chinese native, I can reflect quite a bit on this topic.
Web design in general(technology, UI, Accessibility, Standards etc) are indeed different there. Technology Standard(IE6) aside, much of what you see is driven by cultural influence.
I’ve been working on an article draft on a similar topic. Here’s one of points I plan to touch up on: Western designers and audiences are becoming more appreciate for simple, elegant and clean designs. Chinese don’t think that way. To them, more is more. The reason behind it, is best described by Don Norman’s article last year titled “Simplicity is Highly Overrated”
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html
His article was quite controversial at the time, but I think I was one of few who actually agreed with him. Culture plays a huge role in design. I believe designers will be more keen to it as the web bring us closer.
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I agree Jin, a quick look at Japanese websites is enough to show even from a basically visual glance that cultural expectations of what a website should look like is evident. So it’s a greater issue than translation of the information. That’s where I feel bridging the communities where we are and having standardistas push from within their own communities in their own language is fundamental to the effective dissemination of this knowledge.
Another thing. Say I was a large company with a website that would have to be used in both China and Australia, I would try to avoid just having one website that is repurposed for language alone. At that scale, with the money available, two separate websites in my opinion would be far more effective. Content needs to be specific to the audience and culture, as does design. As you point out by the Chinese example, minimilism isn’t the Chinese expectation. I know if the company was Chinese and their website that I went to deal with was a translation only I’d not relate to it as well.
Look forward to reading your article Jin.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Steven, I think a Web Standards Cafe in Oz that focuses on web standards and China would be a great idea, even if it was one session. My feeling is that there are an increasing number of people who want to know about China, Chinese web design (as Jin so correctly points out) and standards but as there hasn’t been much open dialogue yet they are tucked away wondering about it by themselves. So this dialogue like this is great!
Jin, you are spot on about Chinese and Western taste in web design. People I have spoken to in China and my experience of working on the web in Shanghai back in 2000 was that if pages didn’t have animated gifs, were busy and packed with information then they were not considered to do the job. My understanding is also that in the East people prefer to scroll rather than click which is not necessarily what people want to do in the West.
I think a good example of the differences in approaches can be seen in the differences between Yahoo! UK http://uk.yahoo.com/ and Yahoo! China http://cn.yahoo.com/.
Jin, I also can’t wait to read your artical. I’d love to link to it from WaSP so by all means ping me at henny at iheni dot com.
December 5th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
[...] Working for International Web Standards – Steven writes a very good article on the awareness when designing for international audience. His article was prompted by Henny Swan’s. The example he used happens to be on China, a country I’m quite familiar with. [...]