Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Linguistic analysis of websites: a new method of analysing language, the poor cousin of usability
UI-HCII'07 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Usability and internationalization
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This paper reports the results of a pilot study on the interplay of language and culture in global e-commerce, comparing the multilingual websites of five multinational companies, namely, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. These five companies' websites in English are compared with the translated websites in both Simplified Chinese (SC) and Traditional Chinese (TC) in terms of contents and interfaces. The differences as well as similarities among the original websites in English and the translated websites in Simplified and Traditional Chinese are analyzed for the addition, omission and retention of linguistic and cultural elements. The results suggest that the adaptation to native language and local culture of the target audience and market is one of the important quality indicators for multilingual websites. The results also show that language and culture are inseparable for developing quality multilingual websites in global e-commerce.