Ivory Tower of Babel — Website design and development challenges for a multidisciplinary, multinational, multicultural, multilingual science and technology university in Japan

Language is more than lexis, grammar, and orthography. It is culture and identity, history and expectations. In bringing a website to a new linguistic community, you need to localize more than just your text, date formats, and currency. You have to localize the user experience as a whole. For an e-commerce site that wants to sell mattresses to a new market, words and currency are enough, but if you have a complex community to serve, you must design for heteroglossia, for a space in which many languages, many ways of thinking, co-exist.

The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) was established by the Japanese government to create a truly international graduate university that conducts interdisciplinary science and technology research in English. To accommodate researchers from abroad and participate in the marketplace of global science, English must be the first language, but to deliver on the promises made to the Japanese public to contribute to the economic development of Okinawa and globalization of Japanese science education, Japanese must be the first language. With two priority or first languages, there are two sources of content which must be translated.

Unlike e-commerce websites localized for foreign markets, and unlike university sites that selectively translate a subset of pages for foreign exchange students or use machine translation, all content on the OIST website must be feel native in both English and Japanese.

This presentation introduces our evolving strategies for balancing Japanese and global scientific standards, not only in development, content creation, and design, but also in project management and stakeholder relations, in the ongoing redesign of the university’s website www.oist.jp (due for release in July 2022).

In almost 30 years living in Japan, Micheal Cooper has held a variety of jobs, including educator, interpreter, translator, server/network administrator, developer, university administrator, photographer, manager, and fake priest for restaurant weddings.

After doing graduate work in product design in Germany, Chris Wu started his own print and web design firm in Taipei and now works as the senior developer for a revolutionary Japanese graduate university.