What’s wrong with this picture?
 |
| It's from an article from a parenting website, discussing whether it's all right to drink in front of the kids. |
How about this one?
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| It's from an Australian online news article about outsourcing. |
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them
at all. Most Americans wouldn’t. But for someone from a culture where it’s
wrong to drink alcohol, where a woman’s bare arms are displaying too much skin,
or where showing the bottom of the feet is an insult….
We talked in class about different interpretations of color,
following our reading of Caivano and López’s “The Rhetoric of Black, White and
Red: Reasonability and aesthetics to persuade with color,” but I’d like to take
it just a little further. Intercultural communication is an area of particular
interest for me. What needs to be taken into account if my audience isn’t just
people from my native culture?
The problem is that even though the same light hits our
retinas, not everyone sees the same thing. Take the color green, for example.
Does it symbolize environmentalism? Money, envy, go ahead? Future, energy,
youth?
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| From the Japanese animation Naruto. Gai-sensei is best known for his green outfits and ranting about “The Power of YOUTH!” |
Depending on culture and context, a wink could express
solidarity or flirtation, and can be downright rude in China. “Thumbs up” is obscene in
some countries, means “one” in others, and in Japan commonly indicates a man—although
young people especially will also understand it as Americans do.
On the other hand (no pun intended), it isn’t always enough
to tailor the work to the local audience. IKEA got into trouble that way: In an
effort not to cause offense in Saudi Arabia, they removed all women from their
catalog. People in Sweden and elsewhere promptly took offense.
There’s a lot to think about when dealing with international
audiences.
On Japanese Sign Language (Warning: contains hand gestures
considered obscene in the US):
IKEA controversy: http://gizmodo.com/5947876/ikea-photoshops-women-out-of-saudi-arabia-catalog
and
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