Movie Titles

I have often asked myself why countries feel the need to change movie titles, which end up having completely different meanings.

For instance, the first movie of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' series, was called (translated) 'The Curse of the Half Moon' in italian.
In Japan the movie 'Terminator' was named 'Big Man Boom Boom' and in China, the James Bond film 'You Only Live Twice' was renamed '007 Dies Twice'.
It may seem funny, but to english-speaking film producers, it is a continuous frustrating struggle to copyright their movies' names for the foreign market and vice versa.

Of course, many titles cannot be translated directly, since they wouldn't make any sense or be misunderstood in a different language.
Other cultures, like Japanese, are used to having the title describe the storyline of a film e.g. 'The Bucket List' became 'How to get the Best Life'.
Marketing is also very important: foreign titles are often interpreted as childish or seem too vague in Asian countries and are therefore changed to suit their audiences.

video

This you tube video more or less represents what my blog is about: identifying differences between cultures. It's quite long, but most of the points it makes are interesting and informative, highlighting differences in mentality, etiquette, living etc.

Sense of Direction

Nowadays, navigation systems in cars have become quite indispensable to many of us, who have a poor sense of direction. Sadly many of them are quite impossible to use: some don't have a logical structure, others are tricky to navigate or give inaccurate directions.

Programming such systems is a challenge in itself. People react differently to information and globalizing a stereotypical navigation system wouldn't work. For this reason, they must be localized for different races of people, according to left or right-hand drive, language, age, visual images...

(curtesy of gettyimages)

• left/right-hand drive: navigation systems must be operated with different hands, depending on a country's driving policy (on which side the steering wheel is on e.g. right side in UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa etc.) and must be devised accordingly (except Tom toms).
• language: languages with long words, like German, make it difficoult to fit information on the screen and vice versa i.e. Japanese or Chinese characters.
• age: elderly people's reactions are slower and their eye sight isn't as sharp; bigger buttons must be used, to make them easier to see, voice control is being introduced in many car systems and most buttons are being transferred to the steering wheel so elderly people don't have to reach as much and risk tyring their muscles.
• visual images: countries like China or Japan prefer video-graphic or animated displays with fancy graphics. This is due to their extremely visual sense, based on their culture and writing (characters), which represent graphic images and symbols.

(curtesy of www.smh.com.au)

Some cities are based on grid patterns (see New York or Roman cities), others derive from Medieval times and are based on a more nucleated structure (many European cities like London).
Cities laid out in grid pattern are easier to navigate, therefore using a navigation systemm is easier.
There is evidence of grid pattern laid-out cities, dating back to 2000 BC. In China (1500BC) there was a strict lay-out design for cities, with 9 main streets that crisscrossed a city and four important points of reference (buildings or temples), set to the North, South, East and West of a city.
The Roman castra plan was basted on a composition for the defence of military camps.
The Hippodamian plan, Ancient Greeks used, was based on the designs by Hippodamos of Miletus, Greek architect, urban planner and mathematician (5th century BC).
These structures were later adapted by colonizing Europeans in the New World (16th century), to build their new cities.

(curtesy of blog.lib.um.edu/perz0011/)

Technology

Modern-day home utensils and machines need to be logically structured and easy to operate.

However, needs will differ according to country and culture:
After some research, industrial designers who wanted to design an efficient, easy to use, appealing household product i.e. a washing machine, realized that their product couldn't be globalized.

Why?

People in Southern Europe were generally less eager to use a washing machine that operated through a touch-screen system. This uneasiness was embedded in the common idea of past generations, that the connection of electricity to water wasn't such a good idea. They preferred washing machines operating through a simple knob, where they didn't feel that direct contact was made with wet hands to an electrical appliance.
In Nordic countries however, the idea of a touch-screen washing machine was more successful: the integration of modern technology into the household was met with enthusiasm. Here, a product which operated purely through a knob wouldn't have been successful on the market.
Northern-European countries are more used to using technology in everyday life.

In future, washing machines will be able to contact us by phone to informs us when are wash load is done

(curtesy of gettyimages)

This is because there is less sun present in these regions:

People in Southern cultures (Latin, Arabic, Asian), also named High Context Cultures (according to sociologist Edward Hall), put a great emphasis on visual information and how something is communicated. The big, heavy knob, makes the washing machine's purpose seem obvious and simple to use. Their brain is very sensitive to light, since the sun influences them so much in everyday life, making them more dependant on visual information.
One could call their perception of information romantically complex.
People in Northern climates, on the other hand (Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia...), or Low Context Cultures, like information to be clear-cut, precise and rational. Less sunlight is present in their regions, therefore their light sense within the brain is less utilized, than say, their sense of smell.

Marketing

Packages for manufactured articles must be designed very carefully: for a product to be successful, it must appeal to a wider, even global audience. This is where marketing comes in: it includes the research of attitudes of a wide range of nationalities & cultures towards a product, going towards making it successful.
The use of colour is an important part of packaging.

The colours for the package of washing powder for example, must give the idea of cleansing or freshness.

Who would have thought that designing the packaging for a worldwide product would turn out to be an ordeal in Europe alone?

You see, the colours representing freshness in Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece) are white and blue, in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Hungary) it's green.

The reason for this?

People in southern Europe are strongly influenced by the colours of the sea i.e the Mediterranean or Atlantic, since they are directly connected to it. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe have no connection to it. For them the lush green fields would represent the idea of freshness, contrasting greatly with Southern countries, which are more arid (the predominant land colours would be yellow and brown).

(curtesy of scienceblogs.com and gettyimages)

Design

In a design school in Italy, students were asked to design coloured shapes, with colours each student had mixed him/herself. The result was, that the colours mixed by students from Northern-European countries e.g. Scandinavia, were much lighter than those of students from Southern-European countries like Spain.

Why?

The light in ares further from the Equator, is less bright and strong due to the curvature of the Earth. Rays hitting the extreme North or South of the Earth's surface are much weaker, since they have more atmosphere to travel through. Many rays don't hit the surface directly, but bounce off at a tangential angle, making the light's effect weaker that at the Equator, where the light is very intense. (curtesy of 3.bp.blogspot.com)

The Ancient Greeks decorated the facades of their temples based on this principle: they realized that their artful relief decorations, need not be sculpted too deeply, since the intense light of the sun would bring out their shapes and curves perfectly. In Northern countries however, carved details on Classical architecture need to be sculpted quite profoundly to create the same 3-D effect.

The Geography of Intercultural Communication

(curtesy of gettyimages)

Introduction

Hi, welcome to my blog!
I'm a 4th year student from Wesley College Dublin and for my Environmentalstudies class decided to research and write about how people of different cultures interact with and percieve the environment/objects around them and find the geographical reasons for these differences.
Hope you find my blog interesting and enjoy reading it! :-)