Boeing’s Dreamliner delayed because of cultural differences?

BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum on questions raised by the most recent delay of the Boeing Dreamliner project:

How much autonomy do you give partners in a global collaborative effort? How much direct control do you need? What about trust? How do you account for differences in culture?

[ Link ]

It is exactly this latter question that this blog aims to explore. These issues affect not only global managers; anyone involved with designing and deploying artifacts on the web is a participant in a global conversation and must take cultural differences into consideration.

Posted on January 16, 2008
Filed Under Collaboration, Culture | Leave a Comment

Facebook planning to use “crowdsourcing” for cross-cultural translation

According to independent blog Inside Facebook, the social networking site is planning to leverage its community to help translate parts of its UI:

It has been known for a while that Facebook is working on translating the site into a few new key languages. However, beyond this initial step, Facebook is planning an aggressive “crowdsourcing” approach to translate the site into dozens (if not hundreds) of languages around the world by harnessing the collective volunteer power of its user base.

[ Link ]

Facebook is always one of the examples I use to describe the cross-cultural challenges faced by global sites. I’m intrigued by the suggested approach: it’s one thing to translate the labels in links and titles, something that can be probably be done using community power. It’s more difficult, however, to cater to different cultural expectations regarding things like privacy. I assume that Facebook would still be employing a US-centric model for these deeper issues, especially whenever US law requires it. (I wonder if this level of cross-cultural customization is even possible to achieve in a site like Facebook.)

Posted on January 10, 2008
Filed Under Strategies | Leave a Comment

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