Wednesday, 19 May 2004
In France, They Call It "PQ"
Sitting for a moment earlier today, I had little to do for the present moment but contemplate my immediate surroundings. So I scanned what was in front of me - the walls, the floor, the sink - when my eyes fell upon the package below the chrome-and-porcelain assembly before me.
Toilet paper.
Living in a foreign land as this intrepid adventurer does, one will often encounter reminders of how even the most banal objects take on new twists through necessity - be that cultural, linguistic, or other. Such as, for example, mentioned purely by happenstance, not meant to provoke the more sensible natures of those among you - the "you" to whom I refer when referring to my readers - the plastic-shrouded, neatly-rolled, paper products under my intent gaze.
Toilet paper.
Switzerland, by nature, is a multi-lingual country. Europe, by extension, is an even larger jigsaw puzzle of cultures and languages - often overlapping each other, and even showing a general disdain for national and political borders (if, indeed, concepts could be anthropomorphized to have disdain, or any other emotion for that matter other than the more or less neutral malaise that many of us are accustomed to - and indeed expect - from intangible concepts such as "culture" or inanimate objects such as "cats").
So, having firmly established necessity, one can immediately understand the presence of the hieroglyphics - if not, indeed, their meaning - that served as labeling on the clear plastic packaging surrounding the toilet paper. A number, "16," was followed by a line drawing of a cylinder. This, in turn, was followed by another number, "250," which was in turn followed by "x" and three wavy rectangles superimposed on each other in an isometric view. Or, in shorter terms: "16 (cylinder) 250 x (three wavy rectangles)."
The brevity of this mathematical formula, optimized for efficiency and clarity, can be expanded into English as, "Sixteen rolls of 250 three-ply sheets." Which, in retrospect, is actually summarily clear and brief.
But what of three languages? (German, French and Italian, the three official languages of Switzerland.) Or eleven? (The official languages of the 15 countries in the European Union through 1 May 2004.) Or 20? (The current number of official languages in the expanded, 25-member European Union.)
The E.U. offers economic opportunity if not equality, but the associated price is the requirement (by necessity if not by law) of labeling for the local consumer. Toilet paper, in its utmost simplicity, can actually present a more complicated problem than a cereal. The latter item's ingredients must be listed, but lengthy translations are limited by space. That, in turn, limits the region in which a single package may be distributed (usually geographic, with linguistic affinities). Products such as toilet paper "only" require finding simple concepts (such as geometric shapes used to approximate the product) to represent the content.
I've gradually shed my faux-professorial/British colonial language because, conversely, this entry is getting more serious. Residents in the US are only beginning to experience - with Spanish, and maybe Chinese - the effects of product localization. Taking it up a notch, Canadians are required to support "only" two languages (English and French) by law, but this has been the case for a much longer time. Europe, by law and necessity, has the aforementioned twenty languages to deal with.
Now, this has all been rather academic (and I've tried to underscore that side, as well as - hopefully - its humorous dimension). But there is a very interesting, and concrete, side-effect to using wordless product representations.
Children learn by example; they pick up language form those speaking it around them, from mass media, and - yes - from everyday items, like products on a store shelf. Despite having a pretty acceptable level of French before moving to Paris, I still find myself learning new terms or new uses for old words - even now, almost four years later.
But when a label is purely symbolic, how do you express it verbally? Not that I'll often need to ask about rouleaux de papier de toilette - but surely, it'll happen (and it has) at least once. Not to mention that learning a second (or third, or more) language is often a matter of learning vocabulary to express concepts you already know in your native tongue. It's a lot harder to make a linguistic transition when you are able to rely on what amounts to visual cheat-sheets.
Iconic representations' main (if not only) short-term benefit - finding the right thing, quickly - is even debatable in its usefulness. Symbolic understanding is still based on cultural and historical contexts ("historical" on both personal and cultural levels). What guarantee do you have that your potential audience will infallibly understand "(wavy rectangle)" as "sheet of paper"?
What about more complicated representations of physical objects, or images of objects that your audience has potentially never encountered? A spark plug is hardly an everyday object for much of the world. In the year 2000, the United States counted almost 134 million passenger cars. Even then, how many people have ever seen their engines, much less done maintenance on them? I can only imagine that this segment of the population will dwindle, as the 1950's grease-monkeys disappear and manufacturers continue to obscure or obfuscate engines' inner workings.
How about another challenge: How would you explain what an arrow represents to an alien from another planet? Or "danger," as represented by the color red?
Like most of my entries, this one serves as little more my sharing my mental meanderings with - well, let's admit it, a potential audience approaching zero people plus my computer. But I hope that someone may have found it interesting - maybe even you.
Try to remember that things aren't as obvious as they seem. Even speaking in your own language - to a person, who shares the same background, and lives in the same area as you - there are so many pitfalls that it boggles the mind. Considering every other known animal that surrounds us, it's pretty amazing that we communicate at all. And sometimes, even successfully.