Globally Speaking

Podcast 037

Putting ‘Culturalization’ on the Localization Map

M I’m Michael Stevens.

R I’m Renato Beninatto.

M And Renato today on Globally Speaking we’re looking at maps.

R I love maps.

M Me too, in my kitchen I have nautical maps of the Seattle surrounding

area, the islands, all of this with the depth charts, and on a regular

basis; I end up just like checking out the oddest things. What’s the

water depth in the Puget Sound, in parts of the Puget Sound.

R When I was a kid my father gave me a geographic encyclopedia. It was

five volumes with a couple of pages for each country. I knew that book

by heart. You don’t know how terrible it is for a person like me when a

new country is created or two countries merge because that messes up

all my knowledge about flags and capital cities and things like that.

M You’re going through and memorizing it all over again, and the

nuances, and the changes.

R But our conversation today is fascinating.

M It is, and it really shows the significance of these factors, whether it’s

geographic, political, socio, any of those, and how they affect the

localization industry.

R (2:16) Well, let’s hear it from our guest.

K My name is Kate Edwards, and I’m a geographer and a cartographer,

and I’m also a culturalization strategist. I’ve been doing this work

professionally for about… almost 30 years now. About 24 of that have

been primarily in video games, and I did 13 years at Microsoft, where I

created the geopolitical strategy team to help the company deal with

political and cultural issues and all their content.

And then went on to help Google create their geopolitical team, to help

with Google Maps and Earth, and have been basically a consultant at

large ever since. And I did a brief stint of five years, the last five years,

running the International Game Developers Association.

M You already used a word that I’m not familiar with. Cultural… what was

it?

K Culturalization.

M Culturalization.

K Yes.

M Fill us in on culturalization.

K So, basically in the work that I do… I mean I work… I’ve worked hand

in hand with localization teams for many, many years and a lot of the

people I interfaced with at Microsoft, and all the products were in

localization. But my work, you know, a lot of people will associate the

word localization mainly with translation, not entirely, but mostly, and

so the kind of work that I do though is pretty much everything but

translation.

So, if you have a product with icons that need to be reviewed for their

potentially sensitivity, or cultural impact, or the character design in a

game, or gestures in a game, or other content, or the use of historical

allegory, or the use of faith systems, whether it’s in a game or whether

it’s in some other context, basically anything like that, the

representation of diversity and ethnicity, gender parody, all that kind of

stuff, even something as simple as having like a stock image of a

boardroom where the woman is standing at the head of the table

talking, well that’s not going to work in some cultures because that’s…

to them the woman shouldn’t even be in the room.

R Well, that’s a very good reason to put it there then.

K Well, it is…

M In some ways, the advocacy work.

K Absolutely, so there’s a certain level of advocacy that you can do

through this kind of work but… so, basically that’s what I cover. I

generally cover all of this other kind of stuff that frankly a lot of

companies just forget about.

R Kate, I was always a fan of your column on Multilingual Magazine.

K Thanks.

R Where you covered all these little aspects, and one column that I

remember particularly where you were talking about the names of the

seas, like how the Japanese and how the Koreans call the Sea of

Japan. How the Chinese and the…

M You mean they’re different?

R You didn’t know Michael?

M They’re different names depending on what country you’re in?

K Well, they are. So, in that example that you just gave, I mean the

Korean government calls the Sea of Japan the East Sea, and they’re

very adamant about it, and the Japanese government, as most of the

world, just by the International Hydrographic Office, they basically

adopt Sea of Japan as the most common term for that body of water.

Well, the Korean government will frequently lobby cartographic

publishers to change the name from Sea of Japan to East Sea.

So, when we had this one major incident back in 1996 at Microsoft

where the Korean government… it was because of a game; it was Age

of Empires, which basically made the government get really upset

about how the Choson Empire was being portrayed in the game. But

one of the things they picked up on, is they looked in Encarta

Encyclopedia at the time, and they said wait a minute, you’re not using

East Sea; this is wrong; this is incorrect.

R But that’s a problem, if you think about it, one is on… it’s east for one

but west for the other.

K Exactly and the thing we have to realize, when you hear a government

make a statement like that what they’re doing is they’re… it’s basically

a not so subtle assertion of sovereignty. That’s really what they’re after

because they want to assert that the sea’s name should be East Sea

because it’s our sea, and so it’s east to us and therefore it is ours.

Because the Sea of Japan is pretty blatant who that supposedly

belongs to, even though it is primarily international waters, but part of

the issue is that in the middle of the Sea of Japan/East Sea is a

disputed island called Dokdo in Korean which is occupied by Korea, or

it’s called Takeshima in Japanese. That’s really the center of why this

whole thing is an issue ongoing.

R And you have the famous English Channel and Manche for the French

and…

K Exactly.

R And I imagine that there are other territories on land, not only on sea,

that have this disputed approach.

K Exactly, I mean like Iran will complain that they don’t really like the

name Arabian Gulf. So, often… so, because you have Arabian Gulf

versus Persian Gulf, and that’s why you’ll see a lot of maps just call it

The Gulf, to try and avoid the issue.

M And you’ve mentioned some of these players in tech that you’ve

consulted and helped build programs in. They all have maps that they

provide, how do they reconcile…I mean is this just one of the issues or

like are they…

R You mentioned Google Maps.

K There’s many, many issues. That’s why I basically… at this point in

time… I’ve been doing this for so long that I’ve… a lot of people seek

me out because I’ve developed this esoteric body of knowledge about

every disputed thing on earth. So, I can look at a map and tell you

every little border segment, every island, every place name, all of that

stuff that’s disputed. And so, I get companies coming to me, and they

say we need your help because we want to release maps in X territory

and make sure it’s okay.

So, there’s so many examples of that and it’s… the way a lot of these

tech companies deal with it; I mean both like Microsoft and Google,

and Google especially, one of the things that we did in the six years

that I was with them as a consultant, helping the geopolitical team get

up to speed, is we perfected what we called domain tailoring. So,

basically, it’s a practice that a lot of websites use now, but for Google

Maps in particular, I think they’ve become experts in doing domain

tailoring.

So, basically…what does that mean? So, if you go for example to the

US map… you know, googlemaps.com or maps.google.com, and look

at Kashmir, Northern India, you will see boundaries that are all dashed

because it looks like it’s disputed. Well, if you go the India version it

shows Jammu and Kashmir as an Indian state, because by law in India

you must show that territory as an Indian state. If you don’t, then your

product gets banned.

Just like China, if you don’t show Taiwan as part of China, if you don’t

show the ten-dashed line that goes around the South China Sea as

Chinese territory, you will be banned. It’s just flat out; that’s the law,

and so in some cases it’s that extreme. In other cases, it’s more of a

courtesy. So, for example, most of us know the islands off Argentina as

the Falkland Islands because the British still control them even…

R But Islas Malvinas en Argentinas.

K Exactly, so Islas Malvinas. So, in Argentina you still have to have on

the maps, it has to show Islas Malvinas, not Falkland Islands, and it

must have all the Spanish place names.

R It’s very interesting because our sponsor’s office, Moravia, has an

office in Rosário and the name of the airport in Rosário is Islas

Malvinas en Argentinas. It’s a very interesting approach, and I find this

fascinating, but you also deal with fictitious maps because you said that

a lot of your work these days is in the games space. So, how’s that?

Do you… I used to… when I was a kid, I used to draw islands and

treasure islands—did you do that Michael?

M Of course, of course.

R The pirate map with the little lines where the treasure is hidden, and

the mountains and things like that. Is that…

M It looked a lot like my neighborhood.

R …as a grownup…

M A lot of my maps looked like my neighborhood, where I was hoping the

stuff was buried.

K Well, that’s the thing, in games… it’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated

with working games because… for many reasons. One is because it’s

an evolving art form, and you know, it’s amazing to work on worlds that

are being built out of nothing. Honestly, I tell people one of my key

inspirations for becoming a cartographer was Tolkien’s map of Middle

Earth.

M I was just thinking… when you talked about childhood inspirations, all I

could think about was Lord of the Rings and the map there.

K Exactly, that map really inspired me because he used cartographic

principles and cartography to bring to life something that is completely

unreal, and of course he did other things too. He relied on his expertise

as a linguist to bring the cultures to life through the language, which I

think is one of the reasons why Tolkien’s fantasy world still persists to

this day as one of the most rich we’ve ever seen. Because he was able

to build what we recognize… the way that we recognize cultures in our

world, a lot of it does involve language. Language is such a core part of

culture, and so he did that based on his expertise.

Whereas other writers, for example, Jack Chalker, he wrote a science

fiction series about The Well of the Souls, some planet off nowhere, but

what was interesting is that when you read Chalker’s books he doesn't

focus on language. He focuses on the spatial relationships on the

planet, and so it turns out that Chalker was a geographer. So, that

comes through in his writing—that he emphasized that aspect of the

world, whereas Tolkien emphasized more the culture through the

language.

So, maps that you create for fantasy purposes, I mean any fantasy

world that a game developer makes, I mean you have to watch very

carefully because they’re often using real world objects as inspiration.

Whether it’s a culture, like a specific culture, so for example pretty

much any fantasy desert game I’ve ever seen the people in that culture

look like Arabs and Bedouin people. And I keep trying to push the

developers to go for something different, but they just keep constantly

coming back because it’s such a strong image for us. You see

someone dressed like that and you instantly know they’re from the

desert.

R That’s an image, and that’s the interesting point, and it must be hard for

you because you have your American bias also. How do you strip

yourself from that? I imagine that in other deserts, I mean there’s the

Gobi Desert, and they don’t look like Bedouins there.

K No, they don’t, and every one of us has a bias based on the cultural

context in which we originated. I mean for me, born and raised in

Southern California, I’ve lived in Seattle for half my life, so very west

coast US-kind of mind-set. At the same time, I’m very well-travelled,

I’ve gone all over the world, I’ve spent a lot of time in different cultures,

and as a geographer too that’s something that they… basically the

framework they give you in that field of study is to think about things

and the differences between things, and between places.

So, we’re kind of… we kind of adopt that framework, and so for lack of

a better term kind of set you up to have a very open mind about what

you’re observing no matter where you go—because you’re like in this

constant absorption mode, and you’re in a constant comparison mode.

So, it’s really the comparison mode that has helped me tremendously

in my culturalization work because that’s what a lot of companies need.

Their business strategy is built on distribution by market, and so that is

something where I come in, and when they tell me here’s this project

we’re working on, we need your advice, number one question is always

which markets are you targeting, and don’t just tell the world because

most companies… yes, we want to go everywhere. Yes, I get that, but

most companies have at least in mind some set of countries that

they’re going to target first and foremost, and on that is where I start

building my framework. I can, like, put lenses on, so to speak, that help

me start looking at the content through that perspective of those

markets, and that’s how I start doing that review.

R But… I’m making a great big assumption here. You’re probably called

when they’ve done something wrong.

K Unfortunately yes, well fortunately for me, but unfortunately for them.

R I don’t imagine anybody designing anything will think about this upfront,

as they don’t think about internationalization, which is part of the

product development, let alone all this implication. So, tell us a little

story, we love stories.

M Yes, we love some stories.

K Well, I will tell a story, but you’re right for the most part… there’s two

sides to culturalization as I see it, the way I define it. So, there’s

reactive culturalization, which is basically you’re looking for things that

are going to cause a reaction, usually negative.

So, like the mapping example of Kashmir, Indian government official

sees that, it’s not compliant with their perspective, product is banned,

or a certain gesture, or something else, a symbol, whatever it might be.

I do a lot of reactive culturalization because that’s what companies

mostly pay me for. They don’t want stuff in their product that’s going to

cause people to get angry or ban the product or whatever.

There’s also proactive culturalization, whereas that’s you’re looking for

—ways where you can actually enhance the content experience for the

local market by adding things to the… to whatever you’re building that

will make it feel more local, or make it… just meet local expectations

even better.

So, just one example of proactive culturalization is when I worked on

(for Forza Motorsports, one of the things we did by the… because

obviously it was releasing by language. But what we did is we tailored

the types of cars to the languages, which were more or less relevant to

the markets they were going into. So, for like Italian, we tended to have

pretty much Italian cars because we knew that most of the Italian

players, that’s mostly what they wanted to play. The American version,

the US English version, had a lot of American muscle cars, Mustangs,

Corvettes, stuff like that. I mean they also had some other exotic cars

from Italy and elsewhere.

R Did you flip the driving side for British and Japanese?

K Yes, of course, but then of course you could go on the website, you get

the deal, see the downloadable content, and if you wanted, you could

get all the cars. So, you’re not restricted…

M If you wanted the Italian package you could get that.

K Right, you’re not restricted from getting any car, it’s just that the default

package that came with each language was tailored specifically to

basically make it a more appealing experience for those particular

people. And there’s other examples where that happens, but most of

the reactive stuff… there have been so many issues that I’ve had to

deal with.

There was one… there was a game called Kakuto Chojin on the

original Xbox. It wasn’t around very long because they used an audio

file that had chanting from the Koran, and so this audio file was in the

game, it was discovered very late. I mean so late that most of the

games were already packaged and literally on trucks going to the

stores.

So, this error was found, it was brought to my attention, I listened to it.

Now I don’t speak Arabic, but by listening, I had a very good sense;

this is probably Arabic. Fortunately, at the time, this is when I was still

at Microsoft, I took the file down the hall to the Arabic linguist who

happened to be in my building on my floor. I said hey, what is this? So,

he listens and he’s like… so he tells me what it is. He’s like, it’s the

standard verse that appears in the Koran, and he’s like where did you

find this, and I told him the context. It’s an M rated, hand-to-hand

fighting game that’s really bloody and brutal, and he was just shaking

his head. He was like that’s… you can’t put that in there, it’s like this

has to be taken out; it has to be taken out.

So, I did my due diligence. I contacted all the heads of the subsidiaries

at the time. I said I need your feedback. I need you to like tell me to

stop this, and they did, most of them wrote me back overnight; I

brought that back to the games folks, and I said okay, we’re going to

change this, right? And they’re, like, we’ll change it; we’ll change it right

away, and they did. They just put some generic music in there instead.

Well, the problem was… and you’re going to recall those packaged

units, right? That’s where the problem was. They’re like, well no, we’re

not going to do that. Well you understand of course that the United

States is not a homogeneous society, right? You understand there’s

like eight million Muslims living here and like 50% of Detroit is Muslim,

and here’s the geographer spouting all these statistics to them.

They’re, like don’t worry about it, so we’ll release it in the US only, and

it will be okay and of course, sure enough, three months letter we get a

government… a letter from Saudi Arabia, which was very upset—that

we’ve offended the Islamic faith, and it became a front-page news

story.

M And this is just from the US release?

K Yes.

M That the government of Saudi Arabia did that.

K Exactly.

M Wow, that big implications for companies to think about.

K Absolutely, so anyway that’s where often when I lecture on the topic of

culturalization, I warn people that if you think that your content has

boundaries, you are fooling yourself. Anything that is released today is

instantly ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; it’s a multicultural audience,

whether you like it or not. I mean if you sell… if you release a game, it

doesn't matter if it’s digitally released or hard copy, it will be on the

streets of Shanghai tomorrow morning, literally, being sold for a buck or

less.

And that’s just the way the world works, and so that’s why I implore

companies—you’ve got to get it right the first time because there is no

taking it back. Especially because now in today’s world with social

media, I mean you may wake up the next morning and, like, oh wow,

look—everyone’s pinging our Twitter; something great must have

happened! No, usually that’s something bad. If you didn’t plan it, then

it’s something bad but… so, in this example, basically it turned into this

big debacle.

I ended up having to go over to Saudi Arabia and Dubai and elsewhere

to help do damage control because they wanted somebody from the

headquarters who knows what they’re talking about to come over and

explain to the government what happened exactly. And, of course, my

response was essentially, it’s just cultural ignorance.

R Ignorance, yes.

K It was not intentional which…

R It’s very hard to be… how many people like you exist in the world? I

mean I believe I’m pretty knowledgeable about a lot of stuff, but

compared to the things that you’re sharing and the things that you

know, I’m totally ignorant. So, I’m bound to make this type of mistake,

and when is the right time to think about it because I guess every

product has a cultural element in it.?

K It does to some degree. I mean everything does. I mean that’s the thing

that… I often even used that message when I was still at Microsoft. So,

many companies spend a lot of time training their employees on cross-

cultural etiquette, which is great, I think that’s important.

R Let me be culturally insensitive here…

K Okay.

R One of the things… as a foreigner moving to the United States, one of

the things that struck me in the beginning is how concerned people are

in the United States with offending other people. That’s a very

American concern. In other places, they don’t care; they’ll offend, and

they’ll live with it. So, what offends the Americans? Let’s look at it from

the other point of view. Now you as an American who is so concerned

about offending other people, what can we do to really offend an

American? I really want to know.

M Asking that question.

K Yes, I think…

K Especially in today’s climate, I think there’s a lot of things, and it

depends which kind of American you’re talking to because that’s a

whole big problem at the moment. But for me, it’s like… because I

travel so much, it’s like asking me about my president. I don’t want to

talk about it. I get tired of talking about it. It’s like I had nothing to do

with it.

I mean a lot of people want to talk politics, but I think just on a baseline

cultural offence, I mean obviously Americans are prudish when it

comes to nudity. Compared to most of the world, I guess at least

compared to Europe and Latin America, we are very much prudish

about showing skin and all that kind of stuff. So, I think you could

offend us by stripping down…

Like for example I visited a game company in Finland, and they very

commonly just strip and go in the sauna together because that’s what

you do. Doesn’t matter if you’re co-workers or anything, and so I was

visiting, and they were like hey do you want to join us? It’s like, no, that

makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

R I was telling the story recently that I went to a sauna in Germany, and

when I was there I had my shorts on in the sauna, and the guy comes

in and says people are complaining that you have your shorts on. It’s

unsanitary.

K Exactly, and so I was like… no, I can’t do that.

R I heard that when I came here that there were three topics I should not

talk about, sex, politics and religion. Is that still the rule?

K Well, honestly, I think that’s true globally. I don’t think it’s just the

United States, but in the US these days people will talk politics, it’s just

a matter of what side you’re going to be on. So, you might be in an old

bubble-fest where you’re agreeing with each other, or you’re in this

heated argument. There doesn't seem to be a lot of civil discourse

anymore, unfortunately.

R But isn’t that interesting, you travel also, and you go abroad, and I find

it interesting that you talk to Russians and Chinese, and they have

different views, but they pretty much say, you know, you think you’re a

democracy, you choose, you live with it. But the Russians are very

much in favor, the Chinese are half and half, but you go to the rest of

the world and nobody understands how America… I remember still

when Ronald Regan was elected and everybody was wondering how

can you elect an artist, an actor to be president? So, these are natural

things that happen all the time but you have problems now in the

Philippines, you have…

K Yes.

R Every country has… how many people have I offended so far?

K Probably quite a bit.

M We’ll count, there’s a bell going off in the background, and it’s just been

consistent.

K Well, that’s the thing, as someone who studies geopolitics, the political

systems are… people often ask me for my political opinion on certain

issues, especially in the US, and I’m like, look, I’m not a democrat or a

republican; I’m just a massive cynic. Yes, I do my civic duty, and I vote,

but at the same time I study human systems; I study political systems,

and to me the biggest problem with politics is that human beings are

involved, but unfortunately, they kind of go hand in hand.

M Right, whenever you have two people in the same room you have

politics.

R Well, one of my favorite quotes is this, that “when have three talents

together, you have four political parties.”

K Yes, there you go.

M So, Kate you found a very interesting area in localization that from sort

of the mass market would be more niche, and I think that’s

encouraging for some people who maybe they don’t have a language

background, maybe they don’t have a developer background. What is

your encouragement for people who are interested in this field, and

how to get in and how they can use their skills?

K Well, I think there’s a lot of different ways to employ the skills. In my

case, there was a certain amount of luck involved. Being at the right

place at the right time. A cartographer, geographer entering Microsoft

right when it was getting off the ground with all its multimedia efforts,

and so I was definitely in the right place then with Encarta

Encyclopedia, which was my first project there, and then Encarta World

Atlas.

But the key was I knew I had knowledge and a perspective, a certain

strategic perspective on these kinds of issues that could help the

company because I saw mistake after mistake being made at

Microsoft. And obviously, it’s not just a Microsoft issue, a lot of

companies make these mistakes; it’s just that’s where I happened to

be, and so what I did is I wrote a proposal to create this team, the

geopolitical strategy team. Which, originally, I called it the Microsoft

Office of International Affairs, but they thought that was too grandiose

so…

R We like grandiose.

K Yes, so I kind of liked it, but anyway I… it took me about nine months

to shop that idea round. I was very persistent though. I would sit at

meetings with VPs around the company and promote the idea and

eventually it got to… the last VP I asked was the one who approved it

within five minutes, and I think part of the reason that he did… that was

Paul Maritz, he was from South Africa. And when he… when I

presented my… you know the elevator speech to him, his first reaction

was I thought we were doing this already? I’m like, no, that’s actually

why I’m here, and so he was just like let’s do this; he said we need to

do this.

So, I was really fortunate that he had the insight, I think partially based

on his own cultural experience; that this has to be done, and so what I

did is basically, as I’ve told many students, because I’ve mentored a lot

of people in the field of culturalization, a lot of people who want to get

into it, is basically you’re not going to find a culturalization job open

anywhere at all and so…and I know very, very few people that I’ve ever

encouraged who do anything similar to what I do; just a couple that are

somewhat similar.

And so, what I’ve told people to do, which you have to really think

about, is first find a company that you think you’d want to work for, that

you like what they do; you like their products; you like their mission,

whatever. Get a job there that’s related to your skillset, doesn’t have to

be the best job in the world, just get a job inside, but once you’re

inside, that’s where you become a persistent virus. So, you infect them

with your good ideas; you be extremely persistent.

If their antibodies are too powerful, and they just keep resistance—

which their antibodies basically mean ignorance—if they just keep

resisting, like no we don’t need to do this, we don’t need to do this, and

you’re convinced that they do because you see them making mistakes,

you might want to move onto another company, and see if you can kind

of repeat that experience.

But yes, so for people who want to get into this, though, I’m always

happy to talk with people about it, I’ve got a lot of talks online about the

topic. I did a talk last year at GDC Europe, called Geographer’s Guide

to World Building, which has gotten a lot of fantastic response. It’s up

on YouTube, and I guess that was the first time I took a different

approach to how I talk about it because in most of my talks, it’s always

been more about the reactive culturalization. So, ‘here’s the things you

don’t do’, but for that talk I decided to turn it around and say ‘well,

here’s how you would build a world, thinking about all of these different

layers, the cultural layer and religious layer, political layer’. All these

different things you think about.

R So, if you have one piece of advice that you want to give to somebody

who is in a situation that might need this kind of thing, what is the most

important thing to take into consideration?

K Most important thing is you’ve got to think about it from day one. You

have to think about it early, and this is one of the major contrasts

between localization and culturalization. So, as most of us know

who’ve worked in loc, it’s your work comes more towards the end, even

though it shouldn’t; I’m a firm believer that they need to include loc in

the day one talks, just like everybody else so that they have a good

idea of what’s going on.

Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, but the difference is,

though, that with culturalization, I’m not waiting around for the work to

be done so I can translate it.

M So, with that, Kate do you have anything else that you would like to

share, anything we didn’t ask you?

K I think the only the only other thing I would say is that culturalization

is… what’s funny about it is that when I describe to people what I do, a

lot of people are like, my god, why aren’t we doing that? It’s always

kind of surprising to me that people just don’t think about this

dimension of their content. That there are so many different things that

is in the content, even the color, you know, color usage is a major

cultural component too, and so one of the things I often try and remind

people, as I think I was mentioning earlier, you know, how companies

spend so much money on cultural etiquette for their employees, like

how to hand your business cards with two hands in Asia and all that

kind of stuff. All of that’s very valuable, and I think is something that

should be done but what I think a lot of companies sometimes overlook

is the fact that your content is your ambassador to the world.

END OF CONVERSATION