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Intangible trust perceptions have been shown to form an important part of the User Experience (UX) in relation to various B2C (Business-to-Customer) contexts of use. The extant literature appears somewhat immature in relation to intangible trust and UX models from a “non-Western” perspective. Indeed it appears from our recent e-Banking audit using a novel cross-cultural Expert evaluation instrument that too often “Western” Banks (such as Deutsche Bank) rely on perceptions of “Eastern” cultures viewed through a lens that relies on stereotypical images, signs and Western style templates. We compare two contrasting e-Bank site localization design paradigms: namely that of Deutsche Bank and HSBC with respect to two target audiences: namely China and Taiwan. The findings of the e-Culture audit are aligned to the ubiquitous set of cultural dimensions first defined by Geert Hofstede. This alignment appears to show that the “Western” stereotypical paradigm is not in alignment with either Hofstede's Individualism/Collectivism metric nor with normative semiotic signs that reflect vibrant local urban street cultures. We go on to suggest that the use of card-sorting may speculatively be used to better engender localized sites that are aligned to local target. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This pilot study investigates the potential of automatic translation engines to be used as a tool for literary stylistic analysis. By translating from English into one of 62 languages and then re-translating back into English, the resulting texts were compared with a stylistic analysis of the original. Although the similarity index varied widely between languages - between 90% and 32.9% - many stylistic features were retained. However, more subtle features of the texts were lost in the translation process. The similarity index gives a good indication of the literary subtlety / quality of the text, suggesting that this process may be useful as a preliminary “filtering” technique in deeper stylistic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]