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.

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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.)

Design for eastern cultures should take more notice of the contextual elements that work together to build the design. Design for western cultures should acknowledge that a central object will be the focus of attention, and make sure that object is fully realized.

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.

”... 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.

Great design always connects with people. Designers inspire, provoke, validate, entertain and provide utility for people. To truly connect, designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences. Designers need to understand the relationship between what they produce and the meaning their product has for others. And they need to observe the people they are designing for in their own environments.

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”: it could be an icon, a tune, a concept, or any other cultural artifact that isn’t common in either culture, or an element that has been inherited from a third culture, but that must be localized to both. (I see this often when designing for Latin American audiences; many common elements of the web vocabulary — the “Home” link, for example — seem rooted in American culture, but are expected of most websites.)

This principle is beautifully illustrated in a blog post that has been circulating in the past week that features the Super Mario Bros. theme played in a variety of different musical instruments. Because these performers are all playing the same tune, and because this tune is recognizable yet also quite alien to their traditional repertories, hearing it performed wiith different instruments gives us a better understanding of the instruments, their performers’ styles, and the tune itself.

The Mario theme is a perfect cross-cultural bogie because videogame culture is primarily non-verbal and therefore travels more easily across cultural boundaries. It is also very recognizable and fun, at least to people of a certain age. (Actually, this music is more localized to an age group than to a culture.) However, the key to the viral nature of the Mario theme meme is the whimsical and slightly irreverent idea of playing videogame music with a traditional instrument. (Check out the kid with the balalaika.)

How can we apply this principle to cross-cultural design? The web doesn’t (yet) have many sacred cows to make hamburgers from, so finding our own bogies may be more difficult. We can look for a common element that is alien (yet central) to all the locales being served, and we can key our design approach to cultural responses to that one element. (For example, the “Home” page link mentioned above.) Or we could set up a design excercise with the different parties involved to introduce such an element into the design process, if only to break the ice and provide some initial understanding. The idea is to have some common element that allows the differences between the locales to surface.