BIB_12: Zahedi, F. M., & Song, J. (2001). A conceptual framwork for international web design. IEEE transactions on professional communication, 44(3), 83-103.

In this article, Zahedi and Song develop a conceptual model for web design that address the impact of cultural and individual characteristics on users' perception and satisfaction of web documents. There are six cultural characteristics, which include power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, anxiety avoidance, long-term versus short-term orientation, and polychronic versus monochronic time orientation. There are six individual factors that include demographics (age and gender), professional knowledge, information technology knowledge, flexibility, information processing abilities, and cultural knowledge. The authors define document effectiveness as perceived usability, reliability, clarity, and comprehension.

The cultural characteristics this model uses are widely used in studies examining cultural factors on web design. However, the propositions the authors have concluded on the basis of the cultural and individual characteristics are without any empirical or other support. It seems that the authors just assume that groups that have these characteristics will prefer certain characteristics of the documents they use. To me there is really no new well supported ideas in this article but reporting information from other sources and speculations on the authors part.

BIB_11: Singh, N., & Pereira, A. (2005). The culturally customized Web site. Burlington, MA: Elsevier.

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.

BIB_10: Choong, Y.-Y., Plocher, T., & Rau, P.-L. P. (2005). Cross-cultural Web design. In R. W. Proctor & K.-P. L. Vu (Eds.), Handbook of human factors in Web design (pp. 284-300). Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

In this chapter, the authors aim to give a comprehensive perspective on cultural effects for Web design. Drawing on the theorization of cultural dimensions, the authors organize the discussion into dimensions of web design: affective dimension (including colors and graphics), perceptual dimension, function dimension. These discussions are followed by a cross-cultural web design guidelines developed based on the understanding of these dimensions of design. The guidelines address the following topics: languages and format, presentation and layout, graphic design, cultural preferences for colors, information architecture, searching, and interaction. The chapter closes with a discussion of international usability evaluation, in which the authors discuss specifically the cultural aspects in conducting the usability testing, participant recruiting, and working with local interpreters.

The intended audience is, according to the authors, HCI researchers and Web design practitioners, but technical communicators can definitely benefit from it. The cultural dimensions used in this chapter provide a framework to categorize cultures that can be very useful when analyzing websites. However, we need to be reflective about the reductive tendency in the cultural dimension approach.

BIB_10: McCool, M. (2006). Information architecture: intercultural human factors. Technical Communication, 53(2), 167-183.

In this article, McCool seeks to converge information architecture and intercultural communication, specifically, the notion of cultural dimension, to achieve effective online localization.