When you can’t say it in English, say it in German.

language, german, common german words in english usage, phrases, expressions

From William Rowe:

• zetcho = the apex of the mountain
• tonsei = to shave one’s head and forsake the world

I learned the literal meaning of “karaoke” early last year.

apex, japanese, language, shave and forsake, tonsei, zetcho

It’s hard to be angry with Flickr about unexpected downtime when they post funny things like this.

For my part, this is more than just an excuse to link to DJ Ted Stevens’ Internet Song (yeah, “the internet is a series of tubes”), it’s an excuse to point out how Flickr apparently knows how to speak to their customers in language they we understand. I dare a library to do the same next time the opportunity permits.

challenge, downtime, error message, flickr, funny, language, libraries, ted stevens, the internet is a series of tubes, tubes

…The time for pedantic purism is past; if we wish to communicate with the larger audience, we must use language they understand. We do not have the luxury of defining our words, their definitions are thrust upon us by usage.

I was struck by how much that sounds like something I might have said about libraries — only more compact and pointed — but it’s actually my father describing his position on an argument at the World History Association annual conference a couple weeks ago.

Later, I’ll probably use his words to shape my long standing theme regarding the language we use. Every field of endeavor field employs specific, perhaps opaque, terms; our challenge is to make knowledge accessible to interested outsiders, not exclusive.

In this case, however, the argument was about how we define periods of history in differing geographic contexts.

…we should give in to popular demand and accept the term “medieval” as a global historical period, not just a European period.

If we think about it, we can come up with a dozen reasons why this argument is wrong, but another moment of thought reveals that there’s really not much alternative. And, for an group that identifies itself as “the foremost organization for the promotion of world history,” would they not be failing in that promotional mission if they isolated themselves by demanding a unique vocabulary?

exclusion, history, inclusion, language, medieval, pedantic, pedantic purism, purism, Wilfred Bisson, Wilfred J. Bisson, world history

“Bagged products” is little better than “cookery.” I’m gonna bet that no customer has ever asked the sales people for “bagged products,” that nobody’s ever checked the yellow pages for “bagged products,” and without context, nobody would come close to answering a question on what the heck “bagged products” are all about.

But we do have context.

And within that context, those two words are probably meaningful enough to the potential customers driving by. “Nursery stock,” “pavers,” and “bagged products” are just a few facets of that potential customer’s search for “landscaping” or “gardening supplies.”

The challenge here isn’t to reinvent our vocabularies, but to build systems that help the user who searches for “cookbooks” find more of them without needing an MLS to know the specific terms we used to catalog them. As it turns out, that search returns facets that give the user a hint that “cookery” might also be a good search term (it’s not perfect, but I’m happy to have any examples in this subject in my academic library to point to).

Aside: can somebody explain to me why a book might be cataloged as “Cookery, Indic” rather than “Cookery — Indic”? It’s not like “United States — History — 19th Century” would ever be represented as “United States, History — 19th Century” or “United States — History, 19th Century.” Or would it?

bagged products, language, categorization, subject assignment, classification, librarianship, libraries, lcsh, usability, findability, library systems, search, facet, facets, contextualized, contextualized results

I loved this quote from Dave Young when I first found it, and I love it more now:

Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.

Read that again, but replace the relevant bits with “user” or “patron” and “your library” or “your databases.”

The point of all this in a post from Jessamyn about understanding what users understand.

Part of the problem is that the information landscape and our behaviors — well, our users’ behaviors anyway — have changed faster than our systems and services. That is, the value of the library is distributed among our catalogs, institutional repositories, digital archives, many dozens of databases, and thousands of ejournals. We struggle for ways to differentiate between them when all our patrons really want is “information.”

My friend Joe wrote:

Younger people, naturally, find all of this equivocating silly. They know where they are going to look for information, and it sure as heck isn’t the library — at least not the library as it currently exists. In a healthy way, perhaps, they don’t make distinctions about information. They use it, then move on.

I doubt there are many who praise the complexity, the dis-integration of our online services. Yet because of limitations of our technology and, perhaps, just the enormity of the task, these problems persist.

That’s why I like John Kupersmith’s pages of “library terms that users understand,” where you’ll find a quick guide to usability tested terms and other goodies. Because, yes, one of the biggest problems we face has nothing to do with the technology.

communication design, customer, dave young, future libraries, john kupersmith, language, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, targeting, taxonomy, terminology, user expectations, user knowledge

Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

Then, while Googling for something else I ran across a post in Branding Blog

If you’ve heard me speak publicly, you’ve heard me say, “Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.” Do you know the language of your customers?

Connected, no?

tags: advertising, branding, client needs, customer needs, language, marketing, new marketing, patron needs, web site

It looks like bstat has been localized for Japan! With that in mind, I’d love to hear from international users about what I can do to make localization easier. There will be some big changes in the transition to bsuite, and it might be a good time to make sure I’m properly supporting WP’s translation tables and localization features.

tags: bstat, bsuite, japanese localization, language, language translation, localization, localization features, plugin, translation tables, wordpress, wordpress plugin