hightext

Grrr (we have nothing to learn from Japan part 231432)

"We want to stop our customers doing what they want to do." Get real.

Update:Oh, right... I'm sort of sorry. Still don't see why 3 can't let people have unlimited access to the web with their mobiles even if the quality is bad...

I read Spinoza every day...*

I may have inadvertently sounded like a 'linguistic determinist' with a previous post noting some research which concluded that one's native language has influence on one's perception of events. Linguistic determinism explained as 'the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts' does seem a bit too absolute to me too and if the admirable Prof Norm says "it continues to perplex me that anyone at all does subscribe to the hypothesis of linguistic determinism" and PooterGeek** backs him up then I had clearly better watch my step.

We have all experienced what we thought was a unique and original feeling or idea, only to find someone else had already captured it in a new word or words. Just because we don't have a word for an emotion in our native language, it doesn't mean we can't feel it. A good joke on this here, from Eric the Unread.

But... I always explain in my seminars how the Japanese language often misses out subjects in sentences, especially 'I', and leaves the verb to the end so that you can get a good idea of the listener's reaction and change tack mid-sentence accordingly, and how this is related to the Japanese need for consensus and being self effacing. Also how Japanese written language is pictorial, and therefore Japanese people are quick to grasp graphical representations or concepts and the emotions behind them. These explanations seem to help people tremendously in understanding how to communicate better with their Japanese colleagues.

And my former boss, Mr Makihara, was determined to make English the corporate language at Mitsubishi Corporation because he thought the structure of English would force people to be less vague in expressing their thoughts and take more responsibility for their proposals.

I don't mean by this that Japanese people cannot have ideas that are not available in their language. I suppose I am saying that the language available to you influences your behaviour, rather than what's going on inside your head. Or is the language formed by society's behavioural norms? Again, I'm not a specialist and no doubt those that are will roll their eyes at my stumbles around this subject.

* From Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, "A Bowler Hat".

**whom I keep thinking I must have met - I was at Oxford 1985-1988 same time-ish as him as far as I can work out, plus I was going out with someone at the same college as him for a good chunk of that time. Eyes met blearily over a bacon sandwich at the JCR Sunday brunch perhaps?

Japanese mobile phone culture and urban life

Thanks to Tom, notes from Chris Heathcote/Anti-Mega from ISEA2004 in Helsinki (12th Symposium on Electronic Arts), from Machiko Kusahara of Waseda University's keynote speech on "Japanese Mobile Phone Culture and Urban Life". Chris Heathcote comments that it was "more of a 'show n tell' than a thesis". This is pretty normal for a Japanese presentation. Europeans expect presentations to be 'convince me of your argument', which is something that Japanese and Americans are not so used to doing.

The one about the Brit and the Dane...

I always warn when doing cross cultural training for non-British people working with the British, about the British urge to tell jokes in the workplace. It seems we keep telling them even when we know they can backfire and the medium might be inappropriate (ie e-mail). Recently I was working with a Danish family moving to the US and they said Danes are just as bad too, in particular they have a penchant for telling jokes about sex in the workplace. They realise that they have to bite their tongues now they will be in Redmond Washington (no prizes for guessing which company they are working for).

Seasonally appropriate naughty British seaside postcard (which reminds me of Brighton, where we live)

100th entry on this blog

This is my 100th entry on this blog and as luck would have it, I found the perfect quote today from James Lileks' The Bleat:

In the future, everyone will be hyperlinked for fifteen minutes. And that's a good thing.

Boom bang or bum pang?

A not-quite-sure-why-now-must-be-the-silly-season article from The Times on onomatopoeias in different languages and how some are being eradicated by English when American comic books are translated. Japanese onomatopoeias are still going strong, apparently, which is good to know, because they're wonderful. No doubt the popularity of Japanese manga comic books and TV helps. Here's a longer list, which misses one of my favourites, "bata bata" which is the noise of trying to do several things at once. Japanese onomatopoeia are also an indicator of the influence of Malayo-Polynesian languages on Japanese, I believe.

The cover of an Italian translation of a Japanese cartoon book about the Guru Guru (onomatopoeia for 'round and round') Mahoujin

Net balls

Ah sport and the interweb, bringing nations together in happy harmony...

A quote from an article in the New York Times on China's angry reaction to being defeated by Japan in the Asian Cup football tournament:

China's fast-growing Internet is the main forum for this anger. Lu Yunfei, 29, runs Patriots Alliance Web, a nationalist Web site that boasts 76,000 registered members and 100,000 daily visitors. Last year, Mr. Lu's group rallied online opposition that helped kill a deal for a Japanese group to build a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing. The group has also turned a territorial dispute between China and Japan over the tiny Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea into a rallying cry of Chinese patriotism.

I read elsewhere that Japanese fans in China had adopted the Millwall slogan of 'nobody likes us and we don't care"...

Children playing football outside the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City.

I see what you mean

Interesting discussion on The Feature with Professor Kristof Nyiri, director of the Institute of Philosophical Research, part of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, about visual communication using mobile phones.

"I bet most of the people that you have texted or called today are actually people you will meet face-to-face at some point today. From my research, many mobile calls are to people who are physically close, and many texts are to people you are about to meet."

Seems true from my experience - and e-mails tend to be to people I am not going to meet immediately. I also liked the quote he used from Professor Robin Dunbar of the Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioural Ecology Research Group at the University of Liverpool, that "gossiping is the essence of language". Gossip is of course very high context communication, as you need to know about the background and stories surrounding the people involved in order to understand what is being said. So texting gossip shows low context technology can be used to communicate in a high context way.

And his comment re cultural barriers to using MMS:

"TheFeature: To what do you attribute the relatively slow uptake of MMS? Nyiri: Cost and ease of use play parts, but the key barrier is cultural. People are increasingly taught verbally and, at school, are discouraged to think in terms of images. We did some research with different users who were given MMS devices. The three groups were carpenters, soft drinks salespeople and estate agents. By far the biggest users were the carpenters because they were used to thinking in terms of drawings and images."

Whereas Japanese and Chinese language is still very visual in its written form, with pictograms representing actual things, so that is why Japanese frequently use emoticons and MMS...?

Grape gripes

The ever-excellent Snopes on supposed Japanese mistranslations of "Grapes of Wrath" as "The Angry Raisins".

Key quote:

Whenever we need a humorous story (true or otherwise) to highlight how easily different cultures can misunderstand one another, we turn to the Japanese, folkloric exemplars of foreigners who admire and imitate American culture but are too different from us to truly understand it. We don't lack for amusing anecdotes about how the Japanese have managed to garble some essential part of American culture in typically hilarious fashion, everything from their fashioning Christmas decorations showing Santa Claus nailed to a cross to their mistranslating the titles of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. (We don't hear many accounts of Americans' garbling elements of Japanese culture, though.)

I referred to Snopes before regarding the Santa Claus crucifixion meme here.

Cell image

An article on August 3rd in the Financial Time's Creative Business supplement (subscription required), entitled 'Closing the Culture Gap', says that Samsung Electronic's European design centre's Masterpiece project, of four mobile handsets to replicate European concepts of high status premium products, failed to win over top management, because there is a less well developed market for premium products in Korea "and nowhere near the same sense that a phone can become integral to an individual's self-image and self-esteem."

As the person saying this is Harry Choi, who manages the European centre and who is presumably Korean, I hesitate to disagree, but it seems to me that Koreans also have a sense that their phone is integral to their self-image and self-esteem, but have a different aesthetic and design sense of what a phone that complements their self image should look like.

Take the jewel-encrusted Samsung T500, which was clearly designed to fit the desired self-image of a certain type of woman, but probably not a Western European woman. (It seems to feature mostly on Russian mobile phone sites now...). Apparently the British designers at the Samsung Electronic European design centre came up with a model for women modelled in a cool, heavy ceramic material - no doubt very minimalist and chic to a Western European eye, but possibly looking rather dull to Korean eyes. Another model was cased in wood, titanium and silver plate, to appeal to Jaguar car owners.

Having gone so far as to set up a European design centre in order to understand cultural differences, it does seem odd that 70% of their designs never reach the consumer. Failure of nerve by top management? Or is this the norm for design centres? Or were their designs not very good or not deemed commercially viable?

The Samsung T500