International User Interfaces

Book excerpt: Leading authorities from around the world discuss the latest topics in international user-interface design. With most major companies in the computer industry depending on exports for 50 percent or more of their sales, user-interface design teams face a major challenge in making their products both useful and accessible to the global marketplace. It is no longer enough to simply offer a product translated in ten to twenty different languages. Users also want a product that acknowledges their unique cultural characteristics and business practices. In International User Interfaces, Elisa del Galdo and Jakob Nielsen head a team of acknowledged international authorities who confront some of the problems currently facing international user-interface developers, including: International Usability Engineering. Developing a Cultural Model. Arabization of Graphical User Interfaces. Managing a Multiple-Language Document System. An Intelligent Lexical Management System for Multilingual Machine Translation. A Chinese Text Display Supported by an Algorithm for Chinese Segmentation. Breaking the Language Barrier with Graphics. Cultural Issues That Can Affect Training