« Our web credibility work praised for vagueness | Main | Free software motivates through punishment »
June 06, 2006
How the Japanese interpreted "captology"
When former student Chika Ando was translating my book into Japanese, she wanted to verify the origin of the word captology, so I explained it to her. I coined the word in 1996 to refer to the overlap between computers and persuasion -- computers as persuasive technology = capt
Chika had been reading online how people had translated this word in Japanese. My acronym escaped them. Instead, they translated captology based on a Japanese word that means "to capture little animals."
Somehow, the Japanese version seems more accurate every year.
-- BJ Fogg
(Cartoon is from this page on eToon.com)
Posted by BJ Fogg at June 6, 2006 08:03 AM