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"Push button, receive bacon" - that's how a joke t-shirt interprets those instructional icons from the hand dryers you often see in public restrooms. Out of context, these types of icons can often be humorous or unintelligible. Even in context, their meaning can be obscure. Now imagine that you're from another country. Would the icons you see everyday mean anything to you?

It seems to make sense to use icons for international communications. Rather than writing everything out in several different languages, just use a picture that everyone can understand. There is a problem, though: designing icons that really do get across the same meaning to people from different languages and cultures, even in the proper context, isn't that easy.

Consider the experience of the development of public information icons by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the non-governmental organization that works out voluntary international technical standards for everything from agriculture to construction to internet technology. The originally standard icons, adopted by consensus in 1980, were based on the "ISOTYPE" (International System of TYpographic Picture Education) system of icons and pictograms introduced by Otto Neurath Vienna in 1936. But, soon after the standards were published the ISO determined that the icons did not, in fact, convey the same meaning to people in different countries. The icons have been through several amendments since their initial publication.

Cultural Divides
Part of the problem is the difficulty that designers have in understanding how culturally bound some images are. One commentary on common mistakes in icon design pointed to the seemingly innocuous idea of using a mailbox symbol (usually an American rural mailbox) to indicate mail. Mailboxes actually look very different in different countries (as he illustrates with pictures).

International symbols can still reflect a culture. These sports symbols, designed by Min Wang for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, are meant to suggest Chinese calligraphy. Click on picture to enlarge

Many animals may seem to be universally associated with certain traits; for example, the association of the owl with wisdom. However, IBM's design guidelines for customer's seeking to globalize their business note that in some southeast Asian countries these birds are thought to be stupid. Colors, other natural objects – the list of things that can carry very different connotations in different cultures is a long one.

Hand signals may mean entirely different things in different countries and many of them mean something offensive somewhere. (This is why arrows are always better than pointing hands to indicate directions.) The same can be said of other types of body language.

And, speaking of direction, an icon designer must also keep in mind the languages which are read from right to left. An icon made up of more than one element can be problematic for some audiences if it needs to be read in a particular direction.

The ISO and the international radiation symbol
The ISO decided to deal with the issue of determining which icons it would recommend as international standards by establishing more standards (ISO 9186) for testing icons. The standards detail where and with what audiences to test icons and how to score the results. Icons that reach a certain threshold can be added to ISO 7001.

It's probable that no icon can be understood by people of all cultures and levels of education, especially if the icon is out of context. But a couple of years ago, the ISO and the IAEA did their best to come up with such an icon to warn anyone trying to disassemble a machine with a large source of potentially lethal ionizing radiation, such as a food irradiation unit. The traditional trefoil symbol on its yellow background was only recognizable to someone educated about it. (Many children, it turned out, thought the symbol was a propeller.) The new icon (ISO 21482), shows the trefoil, a skull and crossbones and a running figure on a red background. It may look funny, but it was tested in 11 countries before being released in February 2007. An ISO video explains why and how the symbol was developed.

Wondering about the appropriateness of graphics you've chosen for an international project. Contact MTM LinguaSoft and we can consult with you on what is suitable for the target audiences.

Amy and son Calyx

Amy (her last name is Ukrainian, if you were wondering) joined MTM LinguaSoft in September 2005. Originally from a small town in east Tennessee, she moved to Philadelphia in 1999 to work as Administrative & Program Director for a non-profit establishing community radio stations across the United States, followed by four years of service as Development Director with an international NGO. From her initial work at MTM LinguaSoft with vendors and marketing, she has moved deeper into project management, while also completing her second Master's Degree in Information & Library Science. Amy enjoys the challenges of working with multiple language pairs and formats, on projects ranging from websites and eLearning modules to data generation for machine translation research and database interfaces. (Sometimes, all at the same time....) With her partner of eight years, she has two children, Zoë and Calyx. She also spends some of her evenings working as an Academic Reference Librarian. When not juggling information of one form or another, she gardens, hikes, reads A LOT, (especially about culture, anthology and archaeology, and human communication and linguistics), meanders around her West Philly neighborhood, experiments with food, and continues practicing her Arabic and Spanish.