Inspired by this question on international police icon, I started to wonder
I know it seems like an awful lot of work for a webdev, but it would be interesting. Lots of icons are culture-specific, so it would be interesting to try.
Is is possible? Yes.
Technology-wise, you would do the same thing you'd do for language localisation (see this related SE question for the specificities).
Localization refers to the adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market (a locale). Source
Seems like the definition fits the icon situation perfectly. W3C actually mentions "Symbols, icons and colors" in their list of customisable elements. Just as it happens with content, images are loaded with cultural baggage.
The apple developers site has some guidelines in respect to internationalisation too:
Create or modify language-specific versions of nib files, text, icons and graphics (especially those containing culture-specific images), audio, and video for each locale. Source
Now, in regards to the cases, that's a tricky one because it's not easy to hunt down some good examples, but take a look at this:
In Bangladesh, Iran, and Thailand the "thumbs up" gesture (facebook's "Like") is traditionally an obscene gesture, equivalent to the use of the middle finger in the Western world. Apparently nothing happened, but I bet it was something FB's developers and designers had to consider.
Also, the example from UX.SE cited in the comments has a nice answer (too bad the Q was closed).
Animal symbols can also be dangerous. For example, owls symbolize wisdom in the United States, and an e-learning website may use an icon of an owl to symbolize that a user or student is performing well in an online course. However, owls symbolize stupidity in some parts of Asia, and Asian students may be insulted, not encouraged, by such an icon.
Religious symbols can, of course, be particularly sensitive. Microsoft’s geopolitical product strategy team once avoided embarrassment by preventing the release of the company’s Office XP software containing a moon and stars astrology icon that resembled the Islamic Hila symbol. When religious symbols cannot be avoided, they must be localized, such as when the Red Cross has been adapted as the Red Crescent in the Middle East. Source
One thing is sure: This is a job you can't do based on assumptions. Feedback or research is crucial.
I found this interesting discussion in meta:
And some nice related articles:
Short answer:
It's best to use good icons in the first place - sometimes providing additional help to aid understanding can still be preferable (descriptive text, tooltips, etc.).
Providing alternatives based on language can be better some of the time, but it will always be more expensive.
Longer answer:
In any case, it is preferable to use one set of icons that all cultures recognize. This should always be sought over any workaround.
With that being said, as we've seen some cultures have icons for certain things that differ from other culture's icon for that thing. A lot of the time someone from one culture can still understand what the icon in another culture is. However sometimes they can't. What I'm trying to convey with this is that most of the time icons are not an issue across cultures, especially when descriptive text is provided next to it or a once-shown tooltip for harder icons is provided.
Often addressing a website to a particular culture requires changes to content, sometimes requires layout changes, and often other stylistic changes depending on the particular culture as well. This likely requires a separate site or at least a separate page to address this well.
High-end websites often deal with different languages and cultures of big client bases by offering alternative sites or pages for that language and/or culture. This is usually done by having a link(s) which leaves the decision up to the user. This allows differences of cultures to be addressed more completely.
But if the icons or other small changes are truly the only thing you think you need to change, it is possible to do it based off of the language of the user (though not perfectly). If you choose this, please make sure
All of this requires more time and therefore more money. Often times it's better just to improve the original icon anyway.
You can change icons by locale. However, the browser is not meaningfully telling the locale of it's user.
Many users set their agent language to english. Reasons vary, but basically all language localisations ive seen have bad translations. But even if the translation was good it would affect their ability to google knowlege about issues they have.
Secondly you can not rely on other locale info as the user may or may not belong to that locale. Nothing is as bad as a installer prompting you in a foreign language just because you happened to be abroad. Same applies to icons. For example in my locale the checkmark means wrong, not ok, accept... But because most sites operate under english conventions i assume its has reverse meaning. Localizing just the icon in thiscase would be a monumentous clusterf*#k as now i would have no clue whatsoever.
So localization has a lot of problems if you really have the.manpower to broadly test your site with natives, go ahead. But please do not assume anything by what the browser reports of my preferences. Use a separate url, is fine just as long as you dont autoredirect me its annoying as hell.
