Get a trusted native local leader

According to an article in one of ABC New’s blogs, a US government-funded TV station in Iraq is possibly broadcasting terrorist messages. Why? Because…

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government’s $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

It seems somewhere between upper management and the TV viewers there were native speakers in charge of programming, with an agenda of their own. Talk about the inmates running the asylum!

This is obviously a worst-case scenario, but there are lessons here for anyone managing a communication medium aimed at an audience that speaks a different language than your own. (Say, a global website.)

The obvious lesson is this: place trustworthy native speakers in positions of authority. Why is this easier said than done? In one word: trust. Difficult to achieve, particularly with the “cultural other”.

I was once part of a corporate team that was charged with migrating a series of independent websites onto a single corporate platform. Many of these were local country sites, and in some cases we met a lot of resistance from local stakeholders; the consolidation potentially meant their jobs were going away.

Our job would have been much easier had we had a local (native) project advocate we could trust that guided the local teams through the transition. Not only would this have made the deployment smoother; it would have also helped us at headquarters better understand and appreciate the needs of the country team, and deliver a more useful solution to them.

I now consider having a trusted native local leader key to success any extra-cultural website project.

Posted on May 24, 2007
Filed Under Strategies | Comments Off

Cross-language searches on Google

According to TechCrunch, Google is soon to announce a cross-language search tool:

”... queries will be auto translated into other languages to retrieve more results, and all results will then be translated back into the original query language.”

Search results in both languages are to be presented side-by-side. This seems like an interesting approach to multi-language searching; I’m eager to see it in action.

Posted on May 16, 2007
Filed Under Strategies, W3C | Comments Off

Cultural Dissonance

Humane Systems Design defines cultural dissonance: “a phenomenon that may present itself when an individual that participates in multiple cultures (most of us) is faced with situations where s/he perceives conflicts between a set of rules from one culture and the rules of another.” Interesting pointers to other related resources.

Posted on May 1, 2007
Filed Under Strategies | Leave a Comment

Recently


Categories


Archives