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Understanding the Localisation Process of Mobile Text Messaging on a Cultural CircuitHuatong Sun, winner of the 2004 LRC Best Thesis Award, explains her winning entryOriginally published in December 2004 issue of Localisation Focus. To learn more about Localisation Focus, click here. When mobile text messaging was designed and introduced as a voicemail alerting service a decade ago, nobody had imagined the great impact it would have on contemporary culture and communication technologies. Mobile text messaging has been a popular communication mode in East Asia, Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world no matter if the cultures in those regions are described as high-context, lowcontext, collectivist, or individualist. The popularity of mobile text messaging challenges our prior assumptions of technology use and pushes us to think of issues of culture, usability, and localisation in a broader context. From a design point, mobile text messaging is a hard-to-use technology with inherent limitations (for example, small display, poor inputting methods, and moving environments). From a localisation point, the technology of text messaging involves only minimal localisation work at the developer's site - phone manufacturers mainly just translate the interface and menu into local languages for operational affordances. Why do a large group of users worldwide adopt and stay with a hardto- use and poorly-localised technology? To obtain local explanations and understand cultural factors surrounding this technology use, I conducted comparative case studies of frequent users of mobile text messaging in two distinctively different cultural contexts: the US and China. Methods included survey, diary study, qualitative interview, and shadowing observation. Forty-one frequent users of mobile text messaging participated in the study, with ages ranging from 18 to 30. Among whom, 19 came from the US, and 22 from China. I developed a new framework of cultural usability (Sun, 2004) bringing social-cultural contexts into user activities to guide my research. The fieldwork shows that despite unsatisfactory localisation work at the developer site- "developer localisation", the localisation work at the user's site - "user localisation" -seems to be very successful: Frequent users have been developing localisation strategies and successfully localised this technology into their daily lives. They used mobile text messaging to cope with emotional moments, enhance work and personal life, maintain social contact with old friends, send wedding invitations, exchange funny jokes, coordinate activities between friends and loved ones, and so on. Furthermore, with effective user localisation at local sites, different social affordances of the technology were realised upon similar instrumental affordances of the technology. In the US, participants primarily used text messaging as a form of fun communication and small talk while in China participants used it as a way of staying in contact with friends to exchange longer threads of information. A cultural circuit (Hall, 1997) view of mobile text messaging will help us better understand the localisation process here. As we can see from Fig. 1, the developer localisation only occurs during the process of production, designing the instrumental affordances of mobile text messaging for local users, while the user localisation pervades the processes of consumption, regulation, representation, and identity. Clearly there is a stronger element of user localisation rescuing the weaker developer localisation in mobile text messaging, making the circulation of the technology on the circuit possible. The circuit view also raises questions for current developer localisation. The links between these processes should be two-way transactions, but the fieldwork rarely found how the production process responded to the use patterns emerging from the processes of consumption, representation, and identity. For example, though mobile text messaging technology was used for different communication purposes, the fieldwork was unable to find out how the localised messaging applications provide instrumental affordances for these different communication functions. If this situation continues, the current successful user localisation might not be able to be sustained as the momentum of this circuit decreases. What do the contrasting phenomena of developer localisation and user localisation suggest for our future localisation practices? We need to have an expanded vision of localisation process that includes efforts from design through use, i.e., developer localisation and user localisation. The scope of localisation should go beyond a single stage in the software design and engineering cycle (for example, translation and interface design) and enter the site of local use and consumption. Second, the cultural issue of localisation needs to be situated into concrete use activities within concrete contexts, and the cultural issue of localisation needs to be understood in a dynamic fashion and in a broad way. Third, the focus of localisation work needs to move from localising for operational affordances to localising for social affordances. References Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage. Sun, H. (2004). Expanding the Scope of Localisation: A Cultural Usability Perspective on Mobile Text Messaging Use in American and Chinese Contexts. Unpublished PhD's dissertation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy. About the author Huatong Sun is Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA, with a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research interests lie in user-centered information design, international technical communication, and software localisation. She has been working on website localisation and cultural usability since her Master's project four years ago. She can be reached at huatongs@NOSPAMyahoo.com (remove NOSPAM to email).
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