Yeah -- think about a lot of commonly accepted icons, like for nuclear radiation or biohazards. Or even the weird icons like those for "pause" and "record" on media devices -- these aren't intuitive icons, we've just gotten used to them.

I remember when those (>> for fast fwd, etc) were introduced by Japanese cassette tape companies in the early 70s. They were somewhat controversial!

The media playback icons were supposedly inspired by Wassily Kandinsky.

Hmm, both Biohazard and Radiation symbols were chosen because they look (at least somewhat) ugly and dangerous even to the unfamiliar.

That was what they were aiming for. They wanted symbols that were either obvious in meaning, or 'blank slates' onto which they could imbue meaning. What they were trying to avoid was symbols who preexisting associations would contradict or cause confusion with the meaning they wanted to provide.

Better to give meaning to nonsense than to try and fight against peoples' culture.

> McDonald’s faced this daunting challenge with its recent Nutrition Information Initiative (NII). The company wanted to make nutrition information more accessible and understandable to the average consumer, and determined through extensive research that visual icons representing key food nutrients (protein, for example) were the appropriate course of action.

It sounds like McDonald's had decided the icons were the way to go before bringing in this translation company.

Are you saying it would be better to just teach their customers the English words for these things? Esperanto? I mean, I might probably agree with that, but I don't know that the customers would.

> Are you saying it would be better to just teach their customers the English words for these things?

Yes. It's the same amount of teaching and learning. Actually, it's probably less of both, because:

1. A fair fraction (most?) of the customers would already know some english, whereas zero know what those icons mean.

2. Knowledge of english words is valuable to anyone and is transferable to other domains. Knowledge of McDonald's icons is useless outside of McDonald's.

3. Deciphering english is a trivial peck at an online dictionary. Whatcha gonna do about an icon?

English words are creeping in everywhere anyway.

They explains it in the paper. There are cultural and legal limitations. So your knowledge of English will not help when you travel to a country that requires packaging in native language. On the other hand, learning 'universal' icons will help you everywhere.

An english word is not harder to learn than an icon. It is not harder to attach a cultural and legal explanation of the usage of a word than an icon.

I do enjoy the irony of evading laws that require packaging in the native language, so McDonald's invents a new non-native language instead.