Description
The purpose of this project is to develop a sensitivity to multicultural issues in a diverse environment. Over your working lifetime, you will almost certainly encounter multicultural situations in the workplace. Therefore, it is critically important that you become familiar with the basics of multiculturalism as it relates to technical communication.
For this project, you will be comparing two websites of your choice. The first website that you examine should be a site designed to market a product (or products) to a US market. The second site that you examine should be the foreign counterpart to the first. So, for example, you could examine a Honda site designed for US audiences, then look at a Honda site designed for Japanese audiences. (Here are some links: Look at Honda JapanLinks to an external site., Honda GermanyLinks to an external site., and Honda USALinks to an external site.. If you open them in Chrome, Google will ask you if you want to translate them into English.) You will need to do a bit of research on the target culture that you choose in order to write an effective memo that explains why designers made the choices that they did. This project will not only expose you to elements of multicultural communication, but also begin to show you how different elements of design function in technical communication.
Deliverable
You will turn in a 500-800 word memo that describes the profile of your audience and major differences between the sites that you choose. In your memo, you should:
Introduce the product and briefly describe the purpose of the web pages (advertising, promotion, to forward a political or religious agenda, etc.)
Analyze and describe the audience for each of the pages you examine
Analyze and describe one or two major differences (or similarities) in the sites you examine and explain how those aspects you describe motivate an audience to action
You should include information gathered and any written resources (the class textbook, web sites, etc.). Don’t forget to provide the site URL’s and citations! Cite any references in a “References” section on your memo using APA style citations.
