If you ever had to fill in an official form, online or on paper, you may have just sat there, wondering how to go about satisfying form fields and/or boxes marked with cute little stars. The stars are there to tell you that they demand obligatory information, but they don’t tell you why they demand that information in an obligatory shape that fails to provide accurate information about you, and they don’t let you do anything about this.
Your name, for example, is a favourite
obligatory piece of information, which is often required as “Full
Name”. The trouble starts there. Some of us won’t be able to
comply, faced with space sizes which appear to have been designed to
cater for people whose full names are Bo Ek or Ana Sá. If your
official full name, like mine, happens to consist of two first names,
followed by mother’s surname, father’s surname and husband’s
surname, some of which are in addition double and hyphenated, you are
truly in a bind. Attempting rational tricks, like abbreviating some
of your names by means of initials, may be greeted with human or
electronic brightly flashing rejections. Unless, of course, the form
contains a specific field for things like (obligatory) “Middle
Initial”, which in turn stumps those of us who have no idea what a
middle initial might be, because we are identified by name through
first or last initials – or we have no initial(s), or no “surname”
counterpart to “first name(s)” at all.
Form-filling and other exciting
bureaucratic endeavours have ruled and go on ruling OK. So OK, in
fact, that their morphing from hardcopy to digital medium does not
seem to have affected their basic design. Official forms reflect the
belief that there is a “preferred” (universal?) way of
identifying individuals, whoever and
wherever you are. But bureaucratic standards, like any
standards, vary with time and place.
They are certainly not local-size-fits-all.
Assumedly cross-national forms (or “global” forms, to use
a fashionable word), like the ones we find on the internet, are
“global” only in being there for anyone who can access them
online. Their make-up draws on the local, often country-bound tenets
of the people who designed them. Heather McCallum-Bayliss and Carolyn
Temple Adger discuss these matters in an article titled Variability in naming: Database challenges in multicultural and multilingual settings,
focusing on database management, which, as they observe, “is
especially challenging in settings that are culturally diverse. The
consistent handling of names requires their appropriate cultural
interpretation.”
Assuming that there is a single variant
of people’s names, full or partial, matches the assumption that
people have a single nationality and a single language. Those of us
who have more than one of each of those things go on staring in
dismay at form fields which either allow a single entry, or force us
to “Choose One” from among a fixed set. Country lists are
sometimes available, more or less updated on those countries
that gain or lose official recognition as such. But you can’t list
all the languages there are – even if we knew how many and which
languages there are (or what is a language, for that matter),
which we don’t. So why not give us, form-users, the choice? Why do
we users have to serve the tools that are supposed to serve
us?
Languages
and countries,
and cultures
and identities are not luxury commodities, of which you should own no more than one.
Treating them as such only serves bureaucracy itself, as the comments to a previous post
make clear.
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| Image: © Chrysaora (Flickr) |
Official ideology shows even where
users’ individuality appears to have been taken into account: in
those cases where forms do allow us to choose all of our languages,
we’ll have to rank them. The next post has some more to say about
wanting multilinguals to pull linguistic rank.
© MCF 2012
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