Re: Cultural Issue with the Foot Logo

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

On Do, 2008-10-30 at 13:27 +0700, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan wrote:
> Dear gnome-i18n,
> 
> I believe this is an appropriate place to discuss about cultural
> conventions.
> 
> How is a foot interpreted in your culture? Do you have the same
> issue I have met? In my culture, showing foot is considered rude.
> And the foot is not something to impress people who are totally new
> to GNOME.

Hallo

I think this is a very interesting topic, and it will be interesting to
see how we handle it. I don't think the foot is a problem in my culture,
but in a way, I don't think that is the issue. The issue is that it is a
problem in your culture, and therefore we have to consider it.

I assume that culturally sensitive graphical design is hard, and I guess
you are used to simply taking what you get as a Thai translator. If we
say we are an international group, we should try to accommodate this
difference as much as we work on text layout, GUI translation, date
formats, etc.

I think I know of at least one team that doesn't translate and promote
Firefox under that brand, since the fox is considered negative in their
culture - I guess for Mozilla there is too much in that brand to dilute
it, but they lost that team (in as far as I know). I see there is a beta
translation of Firefox 3 into Thai - I don't know if it is similar for
you perhaps.

While we will probably discuss this much more, a possible solution I'm
thinking of would be to choose something different, but that has a
similar visual style. For example, a hand / tree / bird / whatever of
which the icon is designed so that it looks similar to the GNOME foot.
For RTL languages some icons are swapped around - would a similar
mechanism help to use alternative graphics in the Thai locale? My gut
feeling says no, but perhaps it is something we can work towards.

Just some thoughts. Good luck!

Friedel


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