Communicability in multicultural contexts: A study with the International Children’s Digital Library

This paper presents some contributions of semiotic engineering to the identification of cultural issues involved in the design and evaluation of multicultural systems (i.e. systems designed for users from different cultures). We carried out a communicability evaluation of the International Children’s Digital Library. Participants of test sessions had different nationalities and spoke different native languages. We paid special attention to communicability problems stemming from

language understanding and language use

issues. Our goal was not to make generalizations from our findings, but rather to uncover and understand some of the users’ experience with multicultural systems. In addition to this understanding, we have gained relevant insights to inform the cultural adaptation of ICDL to the Brazilian context, and believe that they can be useful in other cultural contexts as well.