These days, most of us would have heard of Emotional Intelligence, and possibly Social Intelligence.

Now, there's Cultural Intelligence.

Hepatitis National Resource Network (NRN) members recently heard from Wesa Chau, a cultural consultant, who spoke of the need for cultural intelligence in developing resources for people from different cultures.

While some divergence between cultures are obvious, there are less apparent or commonly known cultural differences. Hidden differences include the way people from different cultural backgrounds respond to images and health messages.

For instance, research has shown that people from Western cultures focus on objects in the foreground of a picture while people from some other cultures look at the whole picture before looking at the main object. (Read more about this.)

Wesa also contended that people from some cultures, for example the Chinese, respond better to more direct messages when they are delivered in written form even though the same message may need to be softer when delivered face to face.

"Written material can be blunt and direct," she said. "They also each need to include a specific, obvious and detailed call to action."

She gave the usual warnings about allowing translations to go unchecked. Examples of bloopers included the Melbourne airport sign where "Counter" (as in a place where customers receive services from staff across a counter-top) was translated as "calculator".

In an example closer to health promotion, one NRN member pointed to a drug company's hepatitis B testing campaign a few years ago which featured an East Asian family group wearing white T-shirts, two of them with an ominous-looking black liver emblazoned with "Hep B" in red alarm-clock style lettering.

While white may be the "trending" fashion colour (just check out Eurovision 2015), to the Chinese, it is the colour of mourning. Many contemporary Chinese wear white T-shirts at family members' funerals. So it is unlikely that resources featuring white T-shirts, black livers, black borders and "time-bomb" style lettering, would have gone down well with this community.

That said, developing resources for people from less familiar cultures need not be a stressful experience. The tips are:

• Consult with target community as early as possible
• Write in language as far as possible
• Where translation cannot be avoided,
  
  • run draft translation by people in the target community
  • as a rule, the shorter the phrases, the more you need to check it out
  • write the original text in simple (international) English. No slang.