hightext

We are all individuals

Research conducted by the US National Institute on Aging
gets extensive coverage by the media delighted to discover that Brits aren't uptight, Americans disagreeable and Canadians unassertive etc.

Unfortunately you have to pay to get the original article in Science magazine, but I have a couple of comments based on what I can glean.

First, it is indeed hard in intercultural research to avoid the problem of basing your conclusions on data which is formed from what people tell you they are like (which might be what they want to believe they are like), rather than what they are actually like. So it's always good to look at this kind of research which tries to find out how people actually behave.

Secondly, this research could still be biased, in that apparently the raw data came from the National Institute on Aging's surveys which were seeking to dispel stereotypes on the elderly, so the researchers were already in 'debunking' mode, and weren't specifically focused on cultural differences when they did the research, which might well have made the questions and answers less pertinent.

What I do for a living

Burying some memes

Good old Snopes has laid to rest a few of the cross-cultural memes that I get to hear in the course of my work.

Firstly, the 'bite the wax tadpole' Coca Cola one - it seems Coca Cola itself didn't make such a mistake when translating its name, but local shopkeepers had hung out signs that could be read in such a way.
Secondly, the 'Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead' one.
And finally, the Chevrolet Nova 'doesn't go' in Spanish speaking markets one.

So conspiracy theorists will have to go back to believing multinationals are clever enough to be scheming successfully for evil world domination, rather than stupid and ignorant.

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

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.

This is a pen

Not exactly about information and communication technologies, but fascinating from an intercultural point of view - it seems that babies as young as five months old make distinctions about categories of events that their parents do not, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University in the USA. Previous studies have shown that adults categorise things differently based on what language they speak. It seems therefore that infants across all cultures are capable of making similar subtle distinctions about the world about them, which they lose or amplify depending on the language they then learn.

The example they used to explore this question was differences between how different languages describe space. For example, the distinction between a tight fit versus a loose fit is marked in Korean but not in English. A cap on a pen would be a tight fit relationship, while a pen on a table would be a loose fit relationship. English does not mark this distinction in the same way, instead emphasizing the 'containment' versus 'support' relationship, for example: the coffee is in the mug or the mug is on the table.

The Japanese language has lots of categories for counting, which never cease to amaze English speakers who just count one two three. In Japanese there are different counting words for long thin things, containers like boxes or cups, houses, people, animals, paper, books etc. This is completely second nature to me having been brought up in Japan at exactly the time when a child is taught to enunciate these distinctions. I wonder if that means I unconsciously categorise things rather differently to a completely UK brought up adult?

This research also supports the distinction interculturalists often have to make between intercultural generalisations and racism - that we are not talking about any racial, inherent differences, but learned differences - and confirms that at least in this sense, we are all born 'the same' no matter what ethnicity.

It also shows that cultural differences are real in their effect on peoples' behaviour (another charge we have to refute - that we're all the same really and have learnt to be global in this globalising world), in so far as the language we have as our native tongue has a deep seated impact on the way we relate to things around us.

Pens are long thin things so counted ippon, nihon, sanbon, yonhon, gohon. Japanese schoolchildren used to shout 'this is a pen' in English at me when they saw me in the street in Sendai in the early 1970s.

Unhelpful advice for visitors to London

I recently attributed the 'unhelpful advice for tourists in London - try the famous echo in the British Museum Reading Room' to a New Statesman (UK political magazine) competition. My husband disagreed (ever so nicely of course), saying it came from I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, the long-running BBC Radio 4 comedy programme. I've tried Googling it and it turns out it could even be from Gerard Hoffnung, artist, teacher, cartoonist, caricaturist, musician and tuba player, broadcaster and raconteur - born 1925 in Berlin, died 1959 in London.

1. Evidence for it being Gerard Hoffnung
According to Victor Lewis-Smith
and a site with other unhelpful advice
and Wikipedia

2. Evidence for it being from I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue
Transcript from July 30th 1979 - lots of other unhelpful advice from various editions of the show on this page such as:
It is customary when using the gents lavatory at York station, to greet visitors with a friendly pat on the bottom
If you're visiting Glastonbury, the last weekend in June is quite quiet
The fields around Longleat House are ideal for camping
If you're invited for a game of croquet, it's traditional to give your host a gift of a dozen moles
Millwall fans are known as 'Fairies'
Wales is nice

3. Evidence for it being from a New Statesman competition
Article in the The National Review
From the Tug Boat Potemkin blog who confirms that there was a 1976 New Statesman competition called "Helpful advice for tourists visiting the UK" which included 'London barbers are delighted to shave patrons' armpits' and 'bus conductors like to be paid in 5 and 10 pound notes as they hate carrying heavy coins up and down the stairs', but he does not mention 'try the echo in the Reading Room.'
And from someone who is obviously a fan of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, who says that these are from a New Statesman competion:
Never attempt to tip a taxi driver
Try the famous echo in the strangers' gallery at the House of Commons
Any passer-by is welcome to intervene in a game of cricket

I've found no back up on the web to say that it's the strangers' gallery not the Reading Room... I suppose I'll have to buy all the New Statesman competition compilation books to find out for sure.

The British Museum Reading Room

Cross cultural parking restrictions

From the Sega ad campaign I mentioned previously:

Sign says parking is only for those who are renting the parking spaces.

From my neighbourhood:

Our new residents' parking zone sign.

SIETAR Berlin conference 31 March - April 4

First, a photo of the picture hanging on our hotel apartment wall:
(My cameraphone was not good enough to capture the full glory - it's a textured picture, of a leather clad babe on a bike)

We were staying in an apartment the hotel sublet to us, on Oranienburger Strasse, one of the most multicultural parts of former East Berlin, with a synagogue down the road (heavily guarded thanks to the Afghan aid conference that was going on at the same time) and restaurants with cuisines from around the world - we had Anatolian on the first night, Singaporean on the second, Cuban on the third.

The SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) conference at Humboldt University was very unwired, and I don't mean wireless. I was checking my e-mails on my mobile, or going to the student PC pool, but I don't think anyone else was doing this, and there was certainly no blogging happening either.

I did some traditional note taking with a pen and paper during the sessions on using IT interculturally however, and will turn them into blog postings over the next few days.

Nothing new under the sun

Just when I thought intercultural uses of information and communication technology was a nice little unexplored niche for me to stumble around in, it turns out it's been given a good academic working over for the past 6 years at least, at the biennial 'Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication' conference. So can I scrape together the money and the time to attend CATaC '04 in Sweden? I will definitely be forking out 55 Australian dollars for the proceedings of 2002.

I've always wanted to be able to do this...

...plot the countries I've visited...

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Brazil, China, Australia and the USA make it look more impressive. Definite gaps with regard to the Middle East, India and Russia and the middle part of Africa. One day...

(Thanks to Tom.)

No rhinoceros in the room

A quotation from Betrand Russell appears as an epigraph at the beginning of the book I am currently reading - John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure.

"My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable - I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't."

Lanchester doesn't reveal who this German engineer is (at least not so far in my reading of the book) - it turns out it's Wittgenstein.

I wonder if there's a PhD thesis out there on the influence of cultural background on a philosopher's work?

Dead ant

When I conducted a training programme for a Japanese engineer seconded to Nokia in Finland in September last year, one of the presenters characterised the typical Finn employee as a "solitary worker ant" but I think this might be taking a national stereotype a bit too far!

Crucified Santa

I have lost count the number of times people have told me or I have read the story of the crucified Santa in a Japanese department store window. Snopes, as always, is the voice of sanity on this, deciding, on balance, that the story is untrue, and has its roots in our xenophobic fears that "these foreigners can't be trusted with our religion and our traditions," especially as the earliest sighting of this story dates to the mid 1980s, when the Japanese Economic Miracle and consequent Japan bashing was at its height.

Tengu

When I was seven years old, I was the only Westerner at my all-Japanese school in Sendai, in the north of Japan. One of our projects in art class was to make a mask, and I chose to make a mask of a tengu. Tengu are demons or goblins in Japanese mythology, mischievous rather than evil, who live in trees and are master swordfighters. They are sometimes depicted as part bird, or as red skinned mountain priests, with long noses. This site has more on them.

I thought at the time I made a good mask, and I seem to remember my parents thought so too. But I got a strange reaction from the teachers - who laughed knowingly and said that my choice of character was to be expected. I didn't really understand this and I still am not sure what they meant. I do know I felt humiliated and embarrassed. Was it because I was a westerner, and westerners are famous in Japan for having long noses? Commodore Perry was depicted as a Tengu when he first arrived in Japan in the 1850s.

Or was it because Tengu and long noses symbolise conceitedness in Japan, and I was thought to be rather too full of myself? I was sure of how good my mask was, especially as everyone else in the class had created dull and predictable princess masks.

Paranoia, ignorance of symbols, refusing to conform to a cultural norm - I now realise they are all signs of intercultural frictions, and I still can't help liking Tengu masks!

Hightext

I called this blog "hightext" to encapsulate the main point I want to make about cross cultural communication and ICT (information and communication technologies). ICT is mostly and unavoidably very low context. The message is contained in the text. Body language, signs of status, seniority, networks, connections, education, gender etc are almost always missing. Low context cultures are happy with this and assume everyone else is. High context cultures are uncomfortable with the messages received from low context cultures in this medium, and often try to find ways to create higher contexts, hence my coinage of hightext.