Applying Hofstede's and Hall's cultural models, Singh and Pereira examine how difference cultural dimensions or values, specifically, individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity-femininity, and high-low context, affect web design and how this understanding can be applied to website localization. Singh and Pereira report the results of a study comparing the websites and users' perceptions from five countries, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. The results show that users respond positively to the highly culturally adapted websites. The authors then provide guidelines for web localization according to the five cultural dimensions or values.
The book lays out the rationale for website localization, and is a pretty comprehensive application of Hofstede's and Hall's cultural models to web localization. It provides a basic framework for web localization, from which new consideration needs to be added to adapt to the new developments in Web 2.0. The authors' discussion of globalization, internationalization and localization in chapter 2 provides a theoretical ground for work in web localization.
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