Putting Culturalization on the Localization Map

Globally Speaking

Podcast 037

Putting ‘Culturalization’ on the Localization Map

MI’m Michael Stevens.

R I’m Renato Beninatto.

MAnd Renato today on Globally Speaking we’re looking at maps.

RI love maps.

MMe too, in my kitchen I have nautical maps of the Seattle surrounding area, the islands, all of this with the depth charts, and on a regular basis; I end up just like checking out the oddest things. What’s the water depth in the Puget Sound, in parts of the Puget Sound.

RWhen I was a kid my father gave me a geographic encyclopedia. It was five volumes with a couple of pages for each country. I knew that book by heart. You don’t know how terrible it is for a person like me when a new country is created or two countries merge because that messes up all my knowledge about flags and capital cities and things like that.

MYou’re going through and memorizing it all over again, and the nuances, and the changes.

RBut our conversation today is fascinating.

MIt is, and it really shows the significance of these factors, whether it’s geographic, political, socio, any of those, and how they affect the localization industry.

R (2:16)Well, let’s hear it from our guest.

KMy name is Kate Edwards, and I’m a geographer and a cartographer, and I’m also a culturalization strategist.I’ve been doing this work professionally for about… almost 30 years now.About 24 of that have been primarily in video games, and I did 13 years at Microsoft, where I created the geopolitical strategy team to help the company deal with political and cultural issues and all their content.

And then went on to help Google create their geopolitical team, to help with Google Maps and Earth, and have been basically a consultant at large ever since.And I did a brief stint of five years, the last five years, running the International Game Developers Association.

MYou already used a word that I’m not familiar with.Cultural… what was it?

KCulturalization.

MCulturalization.

KYes.

MFill us in on culturalization.

KSo, basically in the work that I do… I mean I work… I’ve worked hand in hand with localization teams for many, many years and a lot of the people I interfaced with at Microsoft, and all the products were in localization.But my work, you know, a lot of people will associate the word localization mainly with translation, not entirely, but mostly, and so the kind of work that I do though is pretty much everything but translation.

So, if you have a product with icons that need to be reviewed for their potentially sensitivity, or cultural impact, or the character design in a game, or gestures in a game, or other content, or the use of historical allegory, or the use of faith systems, whether it’s in a game or whether it’s in some other context, basically anything like that, the representation of diversity and ethnicity, gender parody, all that kind of stuff, even something as simple as having like a stock image of a boardroom where the woman is standing at the head of the table talking, well that’s not going to work in some cultures because that’s… to them the woman shouldn’t even be in the room.

RWell, that’s a very good reason to put it there then.

KWell, it is…

MIn some ways, the advocacy work.

KAbsolutely, so there’s a certain level of advocacy that you can do through this kind of work but… so, basically that’s what I cover.I generally cover all of this other kind of stuff that frankly a lotof companies just forget about.

RKate, I was always a fan of your column on Multilingual Magazine.

KThanks.

RWhere you covered all these little aspects, and one column that I remember particularly where you were talking about the names of the seas, like how the Japanese and how the Koreans call the Sea of Japan.How the Chinese and the…

MYou mean they’re different?

RYou didn’t know Michael?

MThey’re different names depending on what country you’re in?

KWell, they are.So, in that example that you just gave, I mean the Korean government calls the Sea of Japan the East Sea, and they’re very adamant about it, and the Japanese government, as most of the world, just by the International Hydrographic Office, they basically adopt Sea of Japan as the most common term for that body of water.Well, the Korean government will frequently lobby cartographic publishers to change the name from Sea of Japan to East Sea.

So, when we had this one major incident back in 1996 at Microsoft where the Korean government… it was because of a game; it was Age of Empires, which basically made the government get really upset about how the Choson Empire was being portrayed in the game.But one of the things they picked up on, is they looked in EncartaEncyclopedia at the time, and they said wait a minute, you’re not using East Sea; this is wrong; this is incorrect.

RBut that’s a problem, if you think about it, one is on… it’s east for one but west for the other.

KExactly and the thing we have to realize, when you hear a government make a statement like that what they’re doing is they’re… it’s basically a not so subtle assertion of sovereignty.That’s really what they’re after because they want to assert that the sea’s name should be East Sea because it’s our sea, and so it’s east to us and therefore it is ours.Because the Sea of Japan is pretty blatant who that supposedly belongs to, even though it is primarily international waters, but part of the issue is that in the middle of the Sea of Japan/East Sea is a disputed island called Dokdo in Korean which is occupied by Korea,or it’s called Takeshima in Japanese.That’s really the center of why this whole thing is an issue ongoing.

RAnd you have the famous English Channel and Manche for the French and…

KExactly.

RAnd I imagine that there are other territories on land, not only on sea, that have this disputed approach.

KExactly, I mean like Iran will complain that they don’t really like the name Arabian Gulf.So, often… so, because you have Arabian Gulf versus Persian Gulf, and that’s why you’ll see a lot of maps just call it The Gulf, to try and avoid the issue.

MAnd you’ve mentioned some of these players in tech that you’ve consulted and helped build programs in.They all have maps that they provide, how do they reconcile…I mean is this just one of the issues or like are they…

RYou mentioned Google Maps.

KThere’s many, many issues.That’s why I basically… at this point in time… I’ve been doing this for so long that I’ve… a lot of people seek me out because I’ve developed this esoteric body of knowledge about every disputed thing on earth.So, I can look at a map and tell you every little border segment, every island, everyplacename, all of that stuff that’s disputed.And so, I get companies coming to me, and they say we need your help because we want to release maps in X territory and make sure it’s okay.

So, there’s so many examples of that and it’s… the way a lot of these tech companies deal with it; I mean both like Microsoft and Google, and Google especially, one of the things that we did in the six years that I was with them as a consultant, helping the geopolitical team get up to speed, is we perfected what we called domaintailoring.So, basically,it’s a practice that a lot of websites use now, but for Google Maps in particular, I think they’ve become experts in doing domain tailoring.

So, basically…what does that mean?So, if you go for example to the US map… you know, googlemaps.com or maps.google.com, and look at Kashmir, Northern India, you will see boundaries that are all dashed because it lookslike it’s disputed.Well, if you go the India version it shows Jammu and Kashmir as an Indian state, because by law in India you must show that territory as an Indian state.If you don’t, then your product gets banned.

Just like China, if you don’t show Taiwan as part of China, if you don’t show the ten-dashed line that goes around the South China Sea as Chinese territory, you will be banned.It’s just flat out; that’s the law, and so in some cases it’s that extreme.In other cases, it’s more of a courtesy.So, for example, most of us know the islands off Argentina as the Falkland Islands because the British still control them even…

RBut Islas Malvinas en Argentinas.

KExactly, so Islas Malvinas.So, in Argentina you still have to have on the maps, it has to show Islas Malvinas, not Falkland Islands, and it must have all the Spanish place names.

RIt’s very interesting because our sponsor’s office,Moravia, has an office in Rosárioand the name of the airport in Rosáriois Islas Malvinas en Argentinas.It’s a very interesting approach, and I find this fascinating, but you also deal with fictitious maps because you said that a lotof your work these days is in the games space.So, how’s that?Do you… I used to… when I was a kid, I used to draw islands and treasure islands—did you do that Michael?

MOf course, of course.

RThe pirate map with the little lines where the treasure is hidden, and the mountains and things like that.Is that…

MIt looked a lot like my neighborhood.

R…as a grownup…

MA lot of my maps looked like my neighborhood, where I was hoping the stuff was buried.

KWell, that’s the thing, in games… it’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated with working games because… for many reasons.One is because it’s an evolving art form, and you know, it’s amazing to work on worlds that are being built out of nothing.Honestly, I tell people one of my key inspirations for becoming a cartographer was Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth.

MI was just thinking… when you talked about childhood inspirations, all I could think about was Lord of the Rings and the map there.

KExactly, that map really inspired me because he used cartographic principles and cartography to bring to life something that is completely unreal, and of course he did other things too.He relied on his expertise as a linguist to bring the cultures to life through the language, which I think is one of the reasons why Tolkien’s fantasy world still persists to this day as one of the most rich we’ve ever seen.Because he was able to build what we recognize… the way that we recognize cultures in our world, a lotof it does involve language.Language is such a core part of culture, and so he did that based on his expertise.

Whereas other writers, for example, Jack Chalker, he wrote a science fiction series about The Well of the Souls, some planet off nowhere, but what was interesting is that when you read Chalker’s books he doesn't focus on language.He focuses on the spatial relationships on the planet, and so it turns out that Chalker was a geographer.So, that comes through in his writing—that he emphasized that aspect of the world, whereasTolkienemphasized more the culture through the language.

So, maps that you create for fantasypurposes, I mean any fantasy world that a game developer makes, I mean you have to watch very carefully because they’re often using real world objects as inspiration.Whether it’s a culture, like a specific culture, so for example pretty much any fantasy desert game I’ve ever seen the people in that culture look like Arabs and Bedouin people.And I keep trying to push the developers to go for somethingdifferent, but they just keep constantly coming back because it’s such a strong image for us.You see someone dressed like that and you instantly know they’re from the desert.

RThat’s an image, and that’s theinteresting point, and it must be hard for you because you have your American bias also.How do you strip yourself from that?I imagine that in other deserts, I mean there’s the Gobi Desert, and they don’t look likeBedouins there.

KNo, they don’t, and every one of us has a bias based on the cultural context in which we originated.I mean for me, born and raised in Southern California, I’ve lived in Seattle for half my life, so very west coast US-kind of mind-set.At the same time, I’m very well-travelled, I’ve gone all over the world, I’ve spent a lot of time in differentcultures, and as a geographer too that’s something that they… basically the framework they give you in that field of study is to think about things and the differences between things, and between places.

So, we’re kind of… we kind of adopt that framework, and so for lack of a better term kind of set you up to have a very open mind about what you’re observing no matter where you go—because you’relike in this constant absorption mode, and you’re in a constant comparison mode.So, it’s really the comparison mode that has helped me tremendously in my culturalization work because that’s what a lot of companies need.

Their business strategy is built on distribution by market, and so that is something where I come in, and when they tell me here’s this project we’re working on, we need your advice, number one question is always which markets are you targeting, and don’t just tell the world because most companies… yes, we want to go everywhere. Yes, I get that, but most companies have at least in mind some set of countries that they’re going to target first and foremost, and on that is where I start building my framework.Ican, like, put lenses on, so to speak, that help me start looking at the content through that perspective of those markets, and that’s how I start doing that review.

RBut… I’m making a great big assumption here.You’re probably called when they’ve done something wrong.

KUnfortunately yes, well fortunately for me, but unfortunately for them.

RI don’t imagine anybody designing anything will think about this upfront, as they don’t think about internationalization, which is part of the product development, let alone all this implication.So, tell us a little story, we love stories.

MYes, we love some stories.

KWell, I will tell a story, but you’re right for the most part… there’s two sides to culturalization as I see it, the way I define it.So, there’s reactive culturalization, which is basically you’re looking for things that are going to cause a reaction, usually negative.

So, like the mapping example of Kashmir, Indian government official sees that, it’s not compliant with their perspective, product is banned, or a certain gesture, or something else, a symbol, whatever it might be.I do a lot of reactive culturalization because that’s what companies mostly pay me for.They don’t want stuff in their product that’s going to cause people to get angry or ban the product or whatever.

There’s also proactive culturalization, whereas that’s you’re looking for—ways where you can actually enhance the content experience for the local market by adding things to the… to whatever you’re building that will make it feel more local, or make it… just meet local expectations even better.

So, just one example of proactiveculturalization is when I worked on (forForza Motorsports, one of the things we did by the… because obviously it was releasing by language.But what we did is we tailored the typesof cars to the languages, which were more or less relevant to the markets they were going into.So, for like Italian, we tended to have pretty much Italian cars because we knew that most of the Italian players, that’s mostly what they wanted to play.The American version, the US English version, had a lot of American muscle cars, Mustangs, Corvettes,stuff like that.I mean they also had some other exotic cars from Italy and elsewhere.

RDid you flip the driving side for British and Japanese?

KYes, of course, but then of course you could go on the website, you get the deal, see the downloadable content, and if you wanted, you could get all the cars.So, you’re not restricted…

MIf you wanted the Italian package you could get that.

KRight, you’re not restricted from getting any car, it’s just that the default package that came with each language was tailored specifically to basically make it a more appealing experience for those particular people.And there’s other examples where that happens, but most of the reactive stuff… there have been so many issues that I’ve had to deal with.

There was one… there was a game called Kakuto Chojin on the original Xbox.It wasn’t around very long because they used an audio file that had chanting from the Koran, and so this audio file was in the game, it was discovered very late.I mean so late that most of the games were already packaged and literally on trucks going to the stores.

So, this error was found, it was brought to my attention, I listened to it.Now I don’t speak Arabic, but by listening, I had a very good sense; this is probably Arabic.Fortunately, at the time, this is when I was still at Microsoft, I took the file down the hall to the Arabic linguist who happened to be in my building on my floor.I said hey, what is this?So, he listens and he’s like… so he tells me what it is.He’s like,it’s the standard verse that appears in the Koran, and he’s like where did you find this, and I told him the context.It’s an M rated, hand-to-hand fighting game that’s really bloody and brutal, and he was just shaking his head.He was like that’s… you can’t put that in there, it’s like this has to be taken out; it has to be taken out.