The Concept: A New Paradigm
in Intercultural Communication

Addressing a Lack of Capacity

The key strategy for integral human development must be the localization of the very capacity for development itself. Development capacity cannot be localized if crucial information is communicated in a language or cultural perspective that is essentially foreign to members of a local community.

Billions in financial resources are committed annually by governments, aid agencies, mission organizations, and private entities to provide information to these populations. This information involves such life-crucial subjects as HIV/AIDS, clean water, agricultural practices, and sustainable, community-directed development. Yet the recipients often do not understand or trust this information because it makes no sense to them or lacks authority within their culture. The abundant information made available to resolve crucial health, economic, educational, and social problems effectively does not reach the people who need it the most.

The Top-Down Approach

By necessity, the information that agencies provide is centralized, generalized, and “top-down” in nature. The message must be consistent, broad distribution requirements must be met, and real-world issues of economies of scale, design and delivery requirements, and quality assurance must be acknowledged. The nature of centralized information is to target the broadest possible audience as economically and practically as possible.

The Bottom-Up Approach

On the receiving end are local cultural communities thousands of them with their unique ways of life, ways of relating, and ways of communicating and acquiring new information. At this level of interaction, information must be understandable and credible before it will be accepted and acted on. In short, it must be targeted to a unique audience. Accomplishing this requires specific cultural expertise, focused distribution, a limited scale of production, and assurance of understanding a “bottom-up” approach.

The simple fact is that people will not embrace information unless the language and perspective are familiar to them. But how can this be accomplished in a practical, cost-effective, and meaningful way? How can the gap between “top” and “bottom” be bridged?

Bridging the Gap

Shellbook Publishing Systems founder Michael W. Trainum spent 11 years in Papua New Guinea as a linguist/translator among the Qoqwaiyeqwa people. Located just north of Australia in the southwest Pacific, Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse nation on earth, with 5.3 million people who speak more than 800 distinct languages. It was there that Trainum first developed the Shellbook concept, a process in which information is developed so that any community may "localize" it; that is, adapt it to their own language and cultural perspective while retaining the integrity of the core material.  Between 1993 and 2003, Papua New Guinea's Elementary Reform utilized Shellbooks to assist communities speaking 435 different languages to localize grades Prep, One, and Two curricula for use in their village elementary schools.

Trainum founded SPS to transform the concepts originally conceived in Papua New Guinea into a commercially feasible, technologically enhanced localization management system. This technology, "Shellbook", creates localization resources called "Shellbooks".  A Shellbook integrates information on a particular topic with related localization training, multilanguage and multimedia asset management features, and the ability to create and track any number of "derivative works" in print, audio, or video formats that have been localized by communities in terms of their unique language and cultural perspective.

Shellbooks can be developed, shared, and adapted by government, mission, and development agencies for localization in thousands of communities, globally.

The Process: Shellbook Localization>>