A Position Paper on Cross-Cultural Usability Issues of Bilingual Mobile Phones
http://www.hceye.org

Katre, Dinesh S.
HCeye
2006

Abstract:

Variety of information services like Short Message Service (SMS), e-mail, news, market reports, educational applications and other reading materials are now available on mobile phones. The size of mobile phone and its display is shrinking day-by-day, whereas the volume of information content and services are growing. More importantly, mobile phones introduced in the Indian market have now become bilingual; they support various services in English and Hindi languages. Mobile manufacturers have consciously or unconsciously resorted to English oriented approaches, and as a result of this, they have diluted the culture specific rules and the original form of Hindi language. We have studied the usability of Hindi in four bilingual (Hindi and English) mobile phones manufactured by different companies like Nokia / Reliance 3105 CDMA, LG RD5130, Motorola C118 and Samsung / Reliance C200.