Internationalization

Our world is incredibly vast, and contains a staggeringly large number of different people and cultures within it. Within these different locations, there are many different rules and regional differences that vary wildly from place to place.

 
For example: How often do you think about the date? here in New Zealand, the date is commonly written in the format of “dd/mm/yyyy”, listing the Date, Month and Year respectively in numerical format.

 
However, in the United States the date is written “mm/dd/yyyy”, listing Month, Day and Year in that order. This is something that is important to remember, as it is very easy to mix up these dates. Should an American come to New Zealand and read a date written as 03/10/2016, they would read it as “March 10th, 2016”. When in New Zealand, that date would correctly be read as “The 3rd of October, 2016.” For people who aren’t aware of the differences, this could cause a great deal of problems.

 

Internationalization in Business

When it comes to businesses and organizations, knowing these regional differences can be extremely important. For example, color theory is commonly used in advertising and marketing in order to portray specific emotions and feelings to a targeted group of consumers. The way that this works is that by utilizing specific colors in the design process, you can subliminally influence the thoughts of your viewers, giving them a specific impression of your product.

 
In western countries, the color Red is passionate, impulsive and energetic. It is often used to advertise food products, occasionally sporting goods, and fast vehicles. In South Africa however the color Red is used to represent sadness and mourning, and would be wildly inappropriate for use in advertising for impulse buy products.

 
Cultural differences are also important to keep in mind when coding. For example, not only is the date issue I mentioned earlier a common problem that coders can run into when dealing with foreign markets, there are also many differences in keyboard layouts, text formats and other such things. For example, if your computer is programmed to run Non-Unicode programs in Japanese, it will replace your backslash with a Yen symbol (¥). This can be a huge issue for coders, as the backslash is commonly used in scripts.

 
For small local businesses or government run operations, localization issues are rarely an issue. However, any business that deals with or plans to deal with a foreign market needs to keep these things in mind. Failure to conform to the different requirements of a foreign market can be catastrophic to the success of a business, and performing simple research could save a great deal of time and money.

 

Internationalization in Countries

 

Differences in culture are also important to keep in mind when dealing with foreign people on a more personal level. While language barriers are a commonly known issue that may arise when dealing with people from another nation, more subtle things that people often don’t think about such as body language matter just as much.

 
In most western countries, and even many asian ones, the thumbs up is a common hand gesture used to represent an affirmative, or positive response. However in some nations, the thumbs up means something entirely negative. Differences such as these are extremely common, and differ wildly from culture to culture. As such, it is important to always do your research when you plan to encounter people of a different culture.

 
While most western nations, such as America, The United Kingdom, Oceania and so on are very similar in terms of social requirements and all share a common language, it is generally not as important to worry as much about body language and simple grammar, but even among nations as similar as these ones, there are still things to keep in mind such as date formatting.

 
The key issues come from the much more major differences between Eastern and Western nations. As languages such as Chinese and Japanese are so wildly different from English, the language barrier is much steeper than it otherwise would be between two nations of similar origins. As such, the locale differences between the two nations require even more thought and research than would otherwise be necessary.