World-Ready Learning

Do you have audiences in Dubai, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Bonn? If you’ve authored in English, that’s at least five languages, counting both simplified and traditional Chinese. And realistically, you should include Spanish and French too. Language concerns like these often consume our attention when we create training for other cultures. 

Clearly, delivering training to other parts of the world is a challenge. And translation is an obvious cost.

However, alongside the cost of translation is the often overlooked matter of cultural sensitivities. These can arise in visual images, topic choice, and style. Getting these issues right can make the difference between content that is authentic and trustworthy around the world, and content that flops outside of your home country.

Here some examples of common pitfalls for cross-cultural training:

• Maps and flags: Verify that the boundaries shown on maps are accurate, and that images don’t take symbols from flags out of context. Does your content have a world map in it? How does the map portray the border between Pakistan and India, or the status of Taiwan?

• Food: Even if your content isn’t about food, does it show images with food in the background? If you show or talk about pork, consider revising to make your content acceptable to roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

• Modesty: While ideas of proper dress vary greatly around the world, you’ll need to err on the side of modesty to appeal to the greatest number of people. If your images show bare shoulders, replace them.

• Religion: Few things create as much controversy as insensitivity to religious norms. If you have images that show religious symbols, make sure that you follow the expectations of the religion for using them. If your image of the Buddha also shows someone’s bare feet, pick a different one.

• Humor: On a personal level, humor can be a great ice breaker. However, it’s infamously hard to translate humor, and what’s funny in one culture may be offensive or confusing in another. For example, here’s a pun that works great in Japanese: What language is "strawberry"? Strawberry. More subtly, jokes in general are often based on an uncomfortable situation, which may be more than uncomfortable in another culture.

• Idiomatic language: This doesn’t translate well. And just as importantly, for your many customers who will consume the English version of your training as a foreign language, it’s hard to follow. You may find that your idiomatic phrase opens a can of worms.

You’ll notice that many of these examples are about visual images. This is important when it comes time to translate your training, because by then, you’ve already invested quite a bit of effort and money in getting good images. It’s hard to replace them at the last minute, and costly to repeat your work. So, review your images at the stage where your draft content is first being authored.

To sum up, here are some best practices to include in your training project:

• Image review (and video review, which touches on the same issues): Do your visual images respect the religious, political, and cultural norms of your audience?

• Audio review: Do you avoid using recordings with religious or national meaning, like a prayer or anthem?

• Text review: Do you steer away from humor, idioms, or offensive terms?

If you get these things right, you’ll find that your training is well received by people from Azerbaijan to Zambia.