The Journal of Internationalization and Localization - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017

The paper will outline a research project based on the analysis of diary entries written by a multinational cohort of German, Polish, Chinese and US-American Master students during a time span of 15 months as part of the course requirements for a module entitled “Applied Intercultural Communication” in the MA “International Management and Intercultural Communication / GlobalMBA”. The diary-writing project, which was started in 2013, is intended to serve two main purposes:

1. For the students, the diaries will be a tool and personal “learning log” to gain greater awareness of their own cultural values and to critically reflect on the process of cultural adjustment (or lack thereof) and the experience of travelling, living and studying with a multinational cohort in four foreign countries. In this way, the diaries also represent a dynamic scenario of the students’ acculturation process at various points of their studies.
2. We, as researchers, educators and program developers, want to explore how this experience-based approach allows us to chart a student’s development and attitudinal shifts from the beginning to the end of a 15-month program, both in terms of personal growth and intercultural learning. Consequently, the diaries are intended to serve as a tool to discover and assess which aspects of human experience are globally shared and observable and which areas require the students to undergo processes of cultural localization and adaption in order to function adequately in new cultural environments.

Students are encouraged to observe, monitor and report on any culturally defined and “different” situation without being judgemental. Moreover, students are required to specifically report on the process of team/cohort building and on ways of dealing with criticism, disappointment, conflict and “Otherness”. The findings of our qualitative research will be fed back into the process of further curriculum integration and development.

Achievements perform an essential entertainment function in video games. They instruct and reward gamers, and they serve as status symbols or bragging rights within gaming communities. These texts can be challenging for localisers, since they have multiple functions, align with or subvert game mechanics and narrative, and can contain a range of intertextual references, understood as references to other texts, genres, or popular culture ( Mangiron and O’Hagan, 2006 ). Their localisation, therefore, warrants special handling. In this article, I make the case for achievement texts being a unique text type based on Bernal-Merino’s (2014) classification. Further, I propose a macro-level analysis approach that enables localisers to re-render these texts’ essential component parts.

This study examines website localization practices against the background of a rising awareness of food culture and celebrity chef branding in a digitalized and globalized world. As part of a structured media campaign set up in 2014, the localization of Attila Hildmann’s official website substantially contributed to launching the German vegan chef’s brand in the United States, along with the promotion of his two translated cookbooks and frequent appearances in arranged US TV and radio shows. The two language versions of the official website of German vegan food celebrity Attila Hildmann are compared with respect to their form and content. The objective of the study is to determine to what extent and in which way the German website along with the persona-based culinary brand Attila Hildmann is globalized and localized into English to accommodate for the needs of an American target audience. More specifically, we want to investigate which website content has been copied without any change, and which content has been literally translated, adapted to the target locale (i.e. transcreated by adding or omitting elements), or completely recreated. Focusing on the front-end elements of both website versions, we adopt both a macro level and a micro level approach to assess the degree of localization. Eleven parameters encompassing 28 features are analyzed across selected website sections that we assume to be especially sensitive to culturally specific information and localization strategies. The analysis reveals that a hybrid strategy of globalization and localization has been employed, i.e. the website is partially localized for a US target audience.