Culture Difference in Technical Communications

Recently, I read a very good article by Nancy Hoft, “global Issues, Local Concerns”, published in Technical Communication (second quarter 1999). It's about how technical communicators can broaden their scope of work and deal with culture differences.

Culture is at the very heart of the many differences technical communicators must deal with. Culture is not something you can physically touch and see. But you can't ignore the culture because it is real. "Culture is the way we do things around here, and it is how people think, feel and act". History plays a very important role in understanding culture because culture is slowly and constantly changing over time as the result of interacting, communicating and sharing ideas among people. Dealing with a changing difference is much more challenging, which causes more frustrations in global businesses and in technical communications.

Differentiating where one culture ends and another culture begins is another challenge. According to the author, there are basically three common ways to do it: by national boundaries, by dividing the world into markets, and by language groups.

National boundary seems a common sense to everybody, as we talk about the different cultures in China and America, for example. Do we also notice within some nation's boundaries we can see dozens or more cultures? Like in china, there are 56 different national minorities who speak different dialects or even completely different languages. These different cultures coexist, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not.

Another way to differentiate cultures is by dividing the world into markets. Markets are broader geographic areas than nations. One market could include many different nations. Those nations are geographically clumped together for various economic reasons. Those nations, again, might not share the common language. They might be in a war fighting against each other.

Differentiating culture by language groups can be traced back to the history of computer industry, where most computers and their operating systems have been designed with the assumption that their users would communicate using Latin script only (English, French, German, etc.). Counties like Japan, China and Korea have to develop their own hardware and software. This practice has been kept for decades in computer industry. It is only in the past decade when computers and operating systems have adopted more linguistically sensitive capability, an effort of workaround by "using chopsticks and a fork together".