In the early 1980s, software was an unknown to most of the general public. Large software companies did not exist, computer superstores with large areas dedicated to the storage of software products were unknown and the internet was only used by a few researchers and academics. In the last few decades, all this has changed: Computer software has become a driving force and the core ingredient for many aspects of business and the economy. Developments in computers and computer systems have in turn motivated and evolved the development of operating system software and the application software.

Pressure from world-wide user groups has also steered requirements and developments, and the industry has evolved from the batch-oriented days (where there was limited distribution of "custom" software and systems) to today, where there are powerful real-time desktop systems that embody the principles of object technologies, expert systems, artificial neural networks, parallel computing and network computing.

To capture vital revenue and market share in more countries, most world-wide software development organizations now produce software that is tuned to the needs of local markets. In a global marketplace, limited software clearly has limited appeal, and some countries have specific requirements that must be satisfied for the product to be usable in local markets.

Which means that the cultural adaptation of software forms an important part of internationalization and localization. Different markets require slight but important variations in product functionality. This alteration stage is commonly termed "Nationalization" or "Globalization" and involves adapting a product developed for one national group (e.g. the U.S.) to make it acceptable for another national group (e.g., France).

Examples of this would include dictionaries for spell-checking, algorithms for hyphenation, date/time formats, country defaults, sort orders, address formats, support for accented/double-byte characters, keyboard layouts, units of measurement, and so on. The degree of variety depends mainly on:

1. the particular country the internationalized software is targeted at, and
2. the size of the application in terms of the amount of functionality it provides. As soon as an application is adequately altered to suit all of the local requirements then the software can be qualified as culturally suitable for the market.

During the software design and development process there are unique internationalization and localization concerns which need to be taken into consideration. These concerns have been well documented (see issue 2.3 of the LISA Newsletter for example), and the influence of cultural factors in the design of products has long been a subject of discussion from a number of different points of view.

With the current marketing trend towards globalization, application developers are bound to consider the global picture, bearing in mind the specifics of different countries and their differing cultures. A number of well-established theories in the field of cultural differences demonstrate that the development of good international software products is a difficult process: There are many examples of systems that have failed or have presented major problems for users.

For most developers the real difficulty in knowing how to apply the results and knowledge gleaned during the development and testing phases of their products. The frequently-used strategy of having software developers themselves "test" the usability of the software is totally inappropriate for addressing international design; cultural diversity makes it unrealistic for designers to rely on mere intuition or personal experience when it comes to interface design. Which in turn explains why developers rely on distributed international teams and regional internationalization offices, where the software applications can be internationalized, localized and tested in local, real-world environments.

Ensuring that an application is tested for cultural differences in all target markets it aims to support can be a very time-consuming business. This not only involves testing the application across all the permutations and combinations of operating system servers and clients, but also performing highly specific tests which require a knowledge of the locale being tested, including date/time formats, number formats, currency formats and address formats.

Icons and Bitmaps

A checklist of cultural considerations is long and complex. Take as an example Icons and Bitmaps, which need to be as generic as possible to gain widespread acceptance. Icons and Bitmaps are pictures of objects or actions, and the metaphorical force of an Icon/Bitmap can change dramatically from one country to another. For example, the use of embedded words or letters, flags, body parts, crosses, crescents or stars all have different meanings in different parts of the world. There may therefore be a requirement to prepare different Icons/Bitmaps to suit the different cultures involved in the target markets.

Care should also be taken when choosing colors. Take the color red as a test case: in Japan it symbolizes happiness, in the USA anger, while in Thailand it stands for prosperity. In China, white is the color for death, whereas in most of the western world it rhymes with weddings, while black is associated with death. In Korea a person's name cannot be written in red. In Thailand, each day of the week is assigned a different color: Red = Sunday, Yellow = Monday, Pink = Tuesday, Green = Wednesday, Orange = Thursday, Blue = Friday, Purple = Saturday. In Indonesia red is associated with courage, blue with loyalty, green with peace, white with holiness and yellow with happiness.

In Taiwan black is associated with death and red is associated with good, wealth and prosperity. Red, white and blue evoke colonialism in some countries, while they suggest death in many African countries. Green and orange are politically suggestive in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, suggesting that other color combinations associated with national flags or political movements may have controversial implications.

All of which means being prepared for different Icons/Bitmaps and engineering the application to accommodate Icon/Bitmap substitution to suit the different cultures, since certain images may be offensive or confusing. The recommendation of IBM and other large multinational development organizations is that Icons and Bitmaps should be designed to be culturally neutral, so they do not need to be translated or redesigned when the application is localized.

Bad body language

Graphic designers and application developers must also be careful when depicting the human body in globalized applications. An image that is acceptable in one country may be taboo or inappropriate in another. Body language is a powerful form of communication, but it by no means universal. Some hand signals may be perfectly acceptable in some cultures, obscene or insulting in others; or just plan meaningless in others again.

For example, the "OK" sign in the USA is an obscene gesture in Brazil, while waving the entire hand means "Good-bye" in the UK, "No" in Japan and "Come here" in Peru. In Asia and some African countries one gives gifts with both hands. Interestingly, in many Islamic cultures it is improper to hand over a gift with the left hand.

In the same way, direct eye contact means honesty and candor in Western Europe while in some Asian and African cultures it suggests rudeness and hostility. Nudity or partial nudity is especially open to misinterpretation. Icons or graphics which display gestures can also have unintentional implications. For example, "blinking the eye" is an offense in Hong Kong and Taiwan as is "backslapping" in India and in some European countries; "prolonged eye contact" is an offense in Asian cultures; "sticking the tongue out" is an offense in many cultures; "touching someone's head" is an offense in Thailand and Singapore. Other examples include the "folded arm" in Fiji and Finland; the "raised fist" and the "closed fist salute" in most European countries; the "Stop" gesture in Nigeria; the "Hands on the hips" in Argentina; the "Screwing fist into palm" in France; the "Slapping fist" in Italy; "Using left hand to point" in Islamic cultures; the "Crossed fingers" in Paraguay; the "1st and 4th fingers extended" in many countries; the "4 fingers raised showing palm" in Japan and "Pointing with the index finger" in Belgium and most of Asia.

Clashing symbols

Religion is another highly sensitive issue. Application developers need to be careful when using religious symbols or portraying religious scenes. Sacred symbols include the "Christian Cross" in Christianity; the "Menorah" and "Magen David" in Judaism; the "Crescent" in Islam; "Buddha", "Pagoda", "Dagoba", "Stupa" or "Wheel" in Buddhism; the "Lingam" in Hinduism; the "Pentacle" in Paganism; the "Torii" in Shintoism and the "Yin-yang symbol" - a traditional Chinese belief.

Animals and plants are also sacred in some cultures; examples include "Cows" in Hinduism and Buddhism, "Monkeys" and "Serpents" in Hinduism; "Lotus flowers" in Buddhism and "Chrysanthemum flowers" in Japan. In terms of worship and attire, "Kneeling" is significant in Christianity and Islam; "Palms held together" in Christianity and Hinduism; "Prostration" in Islam and "Sitting cross-legged" in Buddhism. The "Skullcap" or "Yarmulke" is significant in Judaism and the "Turban" in Sikh culture and Islam.

This need to satisfy the varying requirements of these cultural differences means exercising due care when choosing colors, designing to be culturally neutral, and using graphic elements that all users will recognize. An appropriate strategy, as we have suggested, is to use elements which will not require translation or redesign when used outside the country of development. An effort should also be made to restrict to a minimum the number of embedded letters or words used. Part of the internationalization effort, then, lies in ensuring that these considerations are understood and that the application is designed to be culturally acceptable in the various markets.

Dates aren't blind

Another vital cultural issue that must be factored into the specification and design phases is the difference in dates and time formats and calendars between countries. There are many different calendars in use throughout the world, some based on the relative movements of the moon and some based on the relative movements of the sun. Also, there are many variations in how dates and time are formatted for these calendars.

For example, the United States date format is mm/dd/yy whereas in Europe the date format is predominantly dd/mm/yy. In Japan the date format is yy/mm/dd, and it is not untypical to find a date format such as 2/3/10, which relates to the year of the current emperor's reign. The Gregorian calendar is used by most countries, but there are several other calendars in use. Some have different starting points, and some are synchronized with the moon rather than with the earth's rotation around the sun. Japan uses the Gregorian calendar but also has a special Solar calendar, which is simply the Gregorian calendar written in Japanese characters and including an era name in addition to a numerical year. The era name of a date is derived from the name of the reigning emperor. For example, Showa 63, equivalent to 1988, was associated with Emperor Hirohito. The era name Heisei is associated with the reigning emperor Akihito, who succeeded emperor Hirohito in 1989. Thus in 1989, Showa 64 ended, and Heisei 01 began.

The Republic of China (ROC) uses three calendars. In addition to the Gregorian, it recognizes the ROC Calendar which differs mainly in having the months numbered (rather than named) and in having an era name and year dating from the founding of the republic on October 10, 1911. Countries using Buddhist calendars specify their year as the Buddhist Era, which differs from one country to another along with the recognized birth date of the Buddha. So Thailand's calendar counts its years from January 1st, 543 BC, while Korea uses the Tangun Era Calendar.

Arabic countries use both the Gregorian and Islamic Calendars, counting the years from the Gregorian year AD 622; using 12 lunar months; and with a year of 353, 354, or 355 days. Israel uses both the Gregorian and Jewish calendars. The latter numbers its years from the Gregorian calendar year 3761 BC. It has 12 lunar months each regular year, and 7 leap years in a cycle of 19 years, where an extra month of 30 days is added. Thus, a regular year can have 353, 354 or 355 days, and a leap year can have 383, 384 or 385 days.

At a computational level, calculations of date and time need to consider that the first two digits of a date value may not be the month, but could instead be the day or year. In the USA, time is predominantly represented in a 12-hour format, punctuated by AM or PM for before and after midday. In Europe the predominant time format is 24 hour and in some European Countries the expressions AM and PM are meaningless and hence confusing. The format of calendars also varies from country to country. For example, the day considered to be the first in a week also varies from country to country. European calendars often list the dates vertically rather than horizontally, and calendars in most European countries begin the week on Monday rather than Sunday.

The number of the beast

On a more subjective cultural note, local superstitions are interesting and some are worth specific mention because of their impact on society and individual behavior. For example, the numbers 3, 8 and 888 are all lucky in traditional Chinese belief, as is 7 in most countries of the world. The number 8 is deemed lucky in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, as is 9 in Thailand. The numbers 2 and 514 are unlucky in traditional Chinese belief and 4 is an unlucky number in Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan. In China and Japan the number 4 suggests death. The number 7 is deemed unlucky in East and West Africa while the number 6 is unlucky in Thailand. The number 13 is an unlucky number in most countries of the world. In North America, some buildings do not have a 13th floor; floor numbers skip from 12 to 14. Globally speaking, the number 9 has a cosmic significance, while 666 symbolizes evil to many Christians.

 
When it comes to the actual practice of software development, issues go beyond the symbolic dimension of cultural difference: there are also technology-driven issues such as keyboard types and keyboard layouts. Here too, international considerations require substantial planning to ensure that a product which can be used world-wide is culturally appropriate in any given locale. One significant example here is the difference between the American English alphabet which consists of strings of a...z and A...Z characters, And the accented European alphabets with many more characters and keyboard options. There are many thousands of other characters, across many hundreds of code pages, which need to be considered and handled correctly by the application, and these need to be tested by the localization teams during application enabling-testing stages.

A further issue worth remembering is the overhead in development time needed to ensure that the actual application can run successfully on the many different local language operating systems, and all permutations of locales. The support for IMEs (input method editors) in countries which use double byte languages (two bytes for each character) is clearly a requirement for Asian countries, and the challenge of integrating double byte support into an application should never be underestimated by development teams.

The design specification stage is commonly agreed to be the most appropriate time to document and agree on the application's requirements, so that the development cycle can be planned and scheduled to consider the many challenges introduced by the localization process. When all international teams have signed off on the design and functional specification documents, and all requirements documents have been submitted and passed, then the product management team will have all of the input necessary to plan an effective global product.

Impact on localization resources

Clearly, for software to be successful world wide, it is crucial that the customer and potential user cultures are factored fully into the product. Existing Human Computer Interface (HCI) standards go some way, but are not adequately descriptive to capture the cultural and social challenges of international user groups. It is often impossible for the translation and localization groups to actually see the product until a very late stage, sometimes too late. Typically, localization development teams (when compared with application development teams) are relatively small and may not have the time or person resources to analyze and test a product. This means that assumptions made during the development stage may need to be revisited later in the development cycle as a downstream exercise.

If we look at localization as a downstream exercise then we can say that success in planning would imply a proactive approach from the development teams — to establish and nourish an ongoing, productive dialogue with their customers and to come another step closer to understanding the many real-world issues prior to embarking on the software development effort. If on the other hand we look at localization as an upstream exercise then clearly the responsibility for this proactivity is with the localization groups, which makes sense because as products move closer to their release date, both the localization and development teams need to be actively coordinated.

The IBM solution

In light of all these requirements, what is the optimum solution when developing software for worldwide markets? At IBM, we have adopted the concept of a software process or paradigm, so that the tasks that are required to build high-quality software are identified and implemented. A software process is typically characterized by a process framework which defines a number of activities. While software process models may be constructed at any appropriate level of abstraction, the process architecture must provide the elements, standards, and structural framework for refinement to any desired level of detail.

When building such a framework, it is worth remembering that most large applications are functionally decomposed into smaller modules which are generally developed as standalone components and are unit-tested prior to being merged into the larger application. The smaller program units can be isolated and unit-tested in the various regional offices using local operating systems with local locales and setups which reflect the end-user's configuration in that country. This test harness is maximized if each and every permutation and combination of valid, and indeed invalid, end-user scenario is anticipated and tested. When failures in the program are discovered these should be documented and addressed immediately - or as early in the development process as possible.

A cellular example

One interesting example of an implementation of this process paradigm can be seen at IBM's International Lotus Software Lab in Ireland, under the umbrella of their Mobile and Wireless Division. Due to the large number of disparate mobile devices and PDAs used World Wide, IBM needs to distribute the testing and development process across their international offices to ensure success in their World Wide Mobile and Wireless Products. For example, the CDMA standard is pervasive in Japan and the US, whilst GSM is applied in all European countries. Also, each region has its own particular set of devices to implement the local transports and protocols.

This means that key aspects of research, development and testing need to be executed inside a given region. While WAP is now an evolving world-wide standard, other standards for representing data in the mobile world exist (e.g. Compact HTML or cHTML, HTML, XML and so on). Devices and PDAs also differ in how they store and render data internally. For example, PDAs based on the WinCE or PPC OS store data internally as Unicode, whilst others use more local variants (e.g. 8859-1/Latin 1 for Western Europe, 8859-2/Latin-2 for Eastern Europe, and so on). This implies that additional code needs to be developed to address the inconsistent characteristics of the various devices, and to ensure that the devices' character sets are respected and that data to and fro is correctly converted, formatted and rendered.

The very display shapes of cellular devices also differ considerably across manufacturers. Some devices have narrow width and height dimensions for displayed data (e.g. Nokia 6310, Ericsson T68) whilst others have more elongated displays (e.g. Nokia 9210, Ericsson R380). Each form factor needs to be considered and carefully designed for, and then tested for permutations and combinations of locales, character sets, formats, etc used world wide.

The process paradigm that IBM deployed to ensure success in their Mobile & Wireless space had to factor in the various phone manufacturers and telecommunications companies from different regions; the different protocols and transports implemented by these companies, and the different characteristics of all PDAs and Cellular Devices developed for the markets in question.

In so doing, IBM was able to benefit from local knowledge and local expertise in the regions where their products were being developed and tested. Their process paradigm therefore allowed for a high quality, cost effective and simultaneous release of their Mobile and Wireless products in the different markets.

The values of local expertise

The process paradigm adopted by IBM acknowledged two vital factors:

1. the importance of identifying "local expertise" working within the various regions and familiar with the local idiosyncrasies, and
2. the need for these regions to be represented in a way which guaranteed them being fully supported and catered for during product development and testing.

Another important mechanism which IBM use to ensure high quality in their global deliverables can be seen in its "Early Deployment" initiatives. Here, products are taken at Beta and are installed in the distributed heterogeneous networks through which over 300,000 IBM employees work and collaborate every day. During early Beta stages, various aspects of technical input are received from all regions, including confirmation feedback that cultural and regional aspects of the IBM Software Development Process Paradigm have been fully respected and implemented correctly.

For example, in a distributed network any problems with the correct representation of the various single and double byte character sets will surface almost immediately, as will any problems or defects which pertain to data as it moves (via conventional workflow) through different regions where the beta systems are deployed. Early Deployment, then, is another practical testing mechanism for organizations with distributed offices, using new and evolving products in the daily work of IBM employees to discover bugs and deployment issues.

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Currently Pat O'Sullivan works as a Principal Engineer with IBM's/Lotus Software's International Mobile Computing Group at "Lotus Software, Unit 12, Airways Industrial Estate, Cloghran, Dublin 17, Ireland". While Pat has worked in several product development roles with IBM over a period of almost eight years his current interest at Lotus Software is in ensuring that client/server software developed to interact with mobile devices is designed in a way which addresses the needs of the greater world wide markets, as well as addressing the need for cost effective localization. These mobile devices include various WAP Phones, PalmPilots, WinCEs, Pocket PCs and Psion devices. Both of Pat's IBM sponsored MSc and PhD research studies have been in the field of globalization and internationalization of client/server software, and Pat can be contacted as follows:

Email: patosullivan@ie.ibm.com
Tel: +353-1-7046868
Fax: +353-1-8867326

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Acculturating software: A quick guide to the literature

For interested readers, there have been many academic studies conducted on the diversity and differences of global cultures. Some of the better works in this field are from Hofstede and Inkeles, where attempts are made to 1) enumerate the many and important differences between disparate cultures and 2) describe the underlying beliefs which define a society and the nature of its existence.

The impact of the computer age on economy, society and culture is captured by Castells and interpreted by Keniston as promoting a "global monoculture". Keniston's key perception is of the danger of a global and covertly American monoculture that relegates all other cultures to inferiority, antiquity or second place. Keniston's concern is found most noticeably in two key areas, a) the fact that 80% of all software is developed in the USA and b) the predominant language for the world wide web is English. The political scientist Barber terms this world "McWorld", and notes that, even in France (where there has always existed a proud cultural nationalism) over 90% of the most popular films each year are American.

Kano attempts to enumerate the technical challenge of implementing software for use in global markets. Her work includes many references to character sets, code pages, keyboards and solutions for specific internationalization problems within individual cultures.

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