Internet Architecture and News Design: How Language and Cultural Context Affect the Transition of Chinese Language Newspapers from Print to Online

This thesis uses comparisons between the fonts and text stylings of four newspapers – The New York Times, The New York Times Chinese edition, The Liberty Times in Taiwan, and People’s Daily in China – to analyze how the structure and design of the internet is culturally western in use, design, and application. A western cultural context for the internet can make it difficult for media and content designed in different cultural contexts to adapt and transition smoothly to online. This thesis shows this by showing how print and online versions of Chinese-language and China and Taiwan-produced newspapers are not the mirror reflections of each other that English newspapers are and explores some of the reasons behind the browser for this phenomenon. Through a look at the font creation process, font character and glyph encoding, movements within the programming community, and how languages are declared and text orientation manipulated in the back-end of a webpage, this thesis shows how the nature of how the internet is structured favors a western cultural context. This leaves the Chinese-language papers with a myriad of problems when it comes to design, which in turn makes it harder for People’s Daily and The Liberty Times to look the same online as in their print counterparts. This thesis argues for more culturally aware coding and web design practices that take into consideration how much the cultural context of development can affect how technology can translate to other languages and cultures.

Keywords: China, Taiwan, newspapers, design, web design, culture, cultural design, technology translation