In cases where the consequences for misunderstanding, and one's reactions are much less extreme, but people still let themselves be led into a problem by misunderstanding, i'd partly blame the technology because it should accommodate the possibility of people paying attention poorly in situations with minor consequences.
In this case however, where they decided on murder and the worst kinds of interpretation because of what they'd read, the people are to blame far more than any text problem. They're murderous idiots who couldn't pause to think that maybe trying to kill an ostensible family member shouldn't be done before very, very carefully reading what they had said and later first hearing them out if they want to say something more in person.
For that kind of violent stupidity, the stupid itself would have to be fixed if at all possible. No reasonable amount of tech optimization will help because They'll always find something to snag them into deep trouble.
I would argue that there are problems that go beyond being ones of communication and are instead problems of hard obstinacy. These are much harder to solve except usually by crudely deviating around them.
Also, it's sometimes maddening how often society, media, and of course politicians/lawmakers, see extreme cases like the above and try to blame technology with a "do something!" policy solution, even though there will always be extremes of stupid or obstinate that no amount of specific solutions will stop from happening.
But, it's easier to blame a tech or UX standard that's controlled by an agent or entity intelligent enough to be subject to pressure. Easier than it is to blame isolated human extremes of behavior that will in any case not respond to calls for change because their nature makes that nearly impossible.
Many of the particularly idiotic rules or UX requirements we see in the systems that most of us, being more or less reasonable, interact with come from the above-mentioned misguided attempts to proof that system against the absolute worst, forcing the vast majority who don't need such measures into stumbling over them.
I like to journal when traveling and in the late 90s or early 2000s I sometimes went to local Internet Cafés and send travel report of the past few days to myself via email.
One time in Turkey on a computer with a filthy monitor and a very worn out keyboard I was close to despair because my emails were undeliverable.
It took me quite a while to realize that the key where every other keyboard layout has the letter i had an i without a dot. The regular dotted i was some key combo.
Lots of comments about how murder is murder, no need to involve UX. I mean, yes, but it's still a good lesson in why UX matters. Even if there weren't a stabbing and the husband was forgiven, there would still have been a misunderstanding, even if perhaps the text had been one that was intended to be positive.
At first I was confused by the title (my fault) and thought that the article had to do with geo-localization. And only after several paragraphs I could switch to language localization :D
This reminds me of when I constantly got a gender symbol identifier after certain emojis sent from iPhones to Android. I thought it was some new kind of feminist trend, but it was just my phone not parsing it correctly
> The problem was that Emine's cell phone was not localized properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <ı>; when it displayed Ramazan's message, it replaced the <ı>s with <i>s.
So it was the wife's phone that changed the meaning of the message, not his.
You didnt have to go out of your way to provide another excellent example of someone making themselves look silly by making a dumb comment backed by the wrong assumption, but I appreciate the cover.
> The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure to localize cell phones. . . only to be attacked by his wife, her father, and two sisters. He was stabbed in the chest but succeeded in grabbing a knife, stabbing his wife, and getting away. Emine died of her wounds; Ramazan killed himself in jail.
Sorry, I don’t think you can blame this on technology. Stick and stones and all that.
There‘s the root cause of an incident and systemic problems that escalated it to a tragic outcome. The systemic problems are the culture. The root cause is incorrect localization, because the causal link is clear and in the chain of events it comes earlier than culture-specific behavior. So yes, UX killed them.
Localisation isn't the root cause because he'd probably have been stabbed regardless. If you walk into a room to apologise and 4 people attempt to kill you, it was not 1 poorly transcribed text message that was the problem.
> She showed the message to her father, who angrily called Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute.
This is the point where the father found out that the text message was a localisation error. If they were confused about his meaning when they tried to knife him then the root cause was his poor communication skills. Otherwise it was some unknown issue.
Perhaps a person may even consider refraining from violence even after having carefully investigated the situation, regardless of the outcome of said investigation.
Just imagine Picard looking down on us through a force field porthole of the Enterprise, slowly shaking his head in disappointment, whispering to himself: "Savages."
Nothing. In this instance fixing the localisation might have prevented the deaths, but in any specific event there is an array of details that could have produced a different outcome had they been changed, but which aren't causal. Improving localisation is a good thing, but it isn't going to reduce the murder rate.
In this case however, where they decided on murder and the worst kinds of interpretation because of what they'd read, the people are to blame far more than any text problem. They're murderous idiots who couldn't pause to think that maybe trying to kill an ostensible family member shouldn't be done before very, very carefully reading what they had said and later first hearing them out if they want to say something more in person.
For that kind of violent stupidity, the stupid itself would have to be fixed if at all possible. No reasonable amount of tech optimization will help because They'll always find something to snag them into deep trouble.