Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Government Introduction of the Immigration Cap
The UK legal sector have recently complained about the new restrictions in UK immigration law.  The changes to law have been well publicized and can be viewed by the public and all interested parties at the UK Border Agency’s website (see below).  These laws and rules represent a continual and politically complex change.  The laws have been in development since at least 2007.  The UK Border Agency also offers a fresh perspective on these in that it has been in existence only since 2008.  The new agency oversees all customs, migration and border issues related to the greater British public.

Why the Government Has Installed the Cap
The government has issued the “cap” as it pledged to do when it formed the new coalition government in 2010.  In effect, when the old government was voted out of office, the new government made itself responsible in holding up its pledges.  One of these pledges concerned immigration reform.  Immigration reform might have been seen as a necessary evil due to the increase in the migrant worker population.  The UK population is increasing and is expected to reach 70 million by calendar year 2030.  It appears that the government has taken on the task of immigration reform as a means of population control.

Impact on UK Business and the Legal Sector
The impact of the new government regulations will have deep and lasting impact on the UK business and legal sectors.  One reason for this is pure economics.  The new standards set forth by the government require that the points needed by migrants be increased from some 80 to 95 points or so.  Most of the points are assigned to the level of income for the migrant worker.  In order to meet 80 points of the requirements, the highly skilled migrant worker must have an income of £150,000 or greater!  This imposes a rather high salary requirement on the legal and other business sectors.  If for example a migrant legal employee is offered a mere £25,000 to work in the sector – that means they will only be furnished with only 5 points in the new immigration system of rules.

Immigration is Vital to UK International Competitiveness
Immigration is of vital importance to the UK in order to maintain its international competitiveness.  By attracting people from other countries and cultures the UK makes itself and internationally attractive place for business. The UK has language, cultural and pratical skills by the very nature of bring in foreign workers. Not many other countries in the world reflect the same mix of business and culture savvy as the UK. The legal sector is well within its right to see the immigration cap as bad for business and bad for the UK.
Other sectors that will feel the pinch include education. Those seeking an education in the country may find themselves limited to seeking it outside of the UK.  As has been pointed out by the BBC news article (“A-Level Results 2010: A* Grade Boosts New Exams Record”), it is becoming very challenging to find even a position at a university.  This may create a prejudice against the UK education and migration systems in the international community.

References

1)    Highly Skilled Workers, Investors and Entrepreneurs – The UK Border Agency’s Web Page (Link: http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/workingintheuk/tier1/)

2)    Immigration Limit for Tier 1 (General) Of The Points-Based System Web Page (Link: http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/newsfragments/27-intro-limit-for-t1-pbs)

3)    Media Information of the UK Border Agency (Link: http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/news-and-updates/media-information/)

4)    Immigration Law Web Page of the UK Border Agency (Link: http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/policyandlaw/immigrationlaw/)

5)    ‘Immigration Cap Will “Strangle” City Law Firms, Chancery Warns’, Law Society Gazette, Monday, August 23, 2010 by James Dean (Link: http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/immigration-cap-will-strangle-city-law-firms-chancery-lane-warns-0)

6)    Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules HC-59, June 2010 (Link to pdf: http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/policyandlaw/statementsofchanges/2010/hc59.pdf?view=Binary)

7)    EU: Policy, Internal Migrants, Migration News,  July 2010, Volume 17 Number 3 (Link: http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=3617_0_4_0)

8)    “A-Level Results 2010: A* Grade Boosts New Exams Record”. 19 August 2010, BBC News (Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369)

In reviewing the New York Times Article of August 11, 2010 (“Advertisers Seek To Speak to Muslim Consumers”), the author wondered aloud about the pursuit of Islamic and Muslim consumers by marketing agencies and their clients. The marketing groups have famously pursued the consumer interests of the so-called Generation Y (“Gen Y”). Now, they appear to be pursuing the consumer interests of the Muslim and Islamic generations of the world. Which leads one to consider, will this demographic sector of the world population be referred to as Generation I (I for Islam) or Generation M (M for Muslim)?

GenI (or GenM) occupies about 24% of the world’s population (about 1.57 billion out of a global population of around 6.9 billion) according to the article. This seemingly new (and very big) marketing and advertising category is being developed to appeal to the Muslim population of the world. Further this marketing and advertising demographic has a very special, niche and focused appeal. The requirements of halal (being any object or act that is permissible under Islamic law) should and must not be offended by the tastes and requirements of the Muslim demographic. Further, the NYT article suggests that this new phase of advertising also appeal to Shariah – the sacred law of Islam – in order to reach its marketing demographic.

Some famous and not-so-famous examples of this might be that the words halal and Shariah have not yet entered the (Western) vocabulary of Microsoft and their Word processing software! The famous cell phone company Nokia, has even learned of the power of appealing to Islam. Their phones have applications (“apps”) which now alerts their Muslim users to the five daily Islamic prayers and more (such as Islamic Holy days). Islam has become so important that even teas (such as Lipton – a Unilever brand) and Emirates (Airways) are rated high and low by those of Islamic faith around the world. The reasons for the ratings are partially understood. Emirates (Airways) appears to have a low rating for its in-flight serving of alcoholic beverages – which are a “no-no” under Islamic law. The irony here is that the airline is based out of Muslim countries and is seen as the largest Muslim air travel supplier in the world!

Avoid saying “thank you” to a Chinese compliment, and don’t ask a Brazilian personal questions.

Those are among the tips in a new etiquette guide designed to help create a warm welcome for visitors ahead of the 2012 London Olympics.

The list was compiled by VisitBritain, the national tourism agency, and is geared to help everyone from hoteliers to taxi drivers be culturally sensitive.

“Overseas visitors spend more than £16 billion ($25 billion) a year in Britain, contributing massively to our economy and supporting jobs across the country,” said Sandie Dawe, chief executive of VisitBritain.

Read more > London 2012

The allure of the Chinese market is prompting western companies and business locations to have their names translated into Chinese. It is a ticklish task, since Mandarin characters can have both phonetic and descriptive meanings.

Guernsey has lately taken the plunge, registering a Chinese name whose characters imply that it is a “finance island”. According to Kevin Lin, translator for the promotional body Guernsey Finance, the trademark will make it harder for similar tax havens to describe themselves as “finance islands” too.

The response of government officials on nearby Jersey can best be summarised as “harrumph”.

BanxGuernsey is one of a second wave of western organisations seeking meaningful identities in China. Big consumer brands went in years ago. Pizza Hut, according to Mr Lin, adopted a transliteration of its name with the dual meaning “always triumphant guest”. That had connotations of customer service, but was a little elliptical. So the stuffed-crust titan added characters that stood for “happy canteen”.

Coca Cola did better with a transliteration that portrayed its product as “palatable and joyful” and had no connotations whatsoever of tooth decay. But Google, back in the days before its spat with the Chinese government, chose a name (Guge, meaning “harvest song”) that many Chinese thought plain weird. That was appropriate, since Google sounds plain weird in English too, reflecting its geeky co-founders’ inability to spell the term “googol”.

Read more > Chinese adaptions

In this era of globalization, many companies are expanding into numerous countries and cultures. But they should not take a “one size fits all” approach to their business and management styles. As the authors of a new article in a special section on Culture and Psychology in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, point out, people in different cultures think about work in different ways. Being aware of the cultural environment that their coworkers come from may help people work together better.

For example, people have different expectations about teamwork, says Cristina B. Gibson, of the University of Western Australia, who cowrote the paper with Dana M. McDaniel, of the University of California, Irvine. Gibson has interviewed people to understand how they conceptualize teams. “In the United States, people used a lot of sports metaphors. Elsewhere, that just wasn’t a common metaphor.” In Latin America, for example, many people talked about the work team as a family. “If you just use those two contrasts and think about what you might expect from your family versus what you might expect from your sports team, you start to see the differences.” Families are involved in all parts of your life, and are expected to celebrate with you socially. “Your involvement in your sports team is more limited. Less caretaking, more competitive.”

Another example is in the realm of leadership. Many people assume that charismatic leadership is a good thing—using a strong personality to inspire loyalty in others. But that’s not going to work for everyone, Gibson says. “The very same behaviors that are deemed desirable from a leader in one culture might be viewed as interference or micromanagement in other settings.”

The main point is that employers and researchers should question assumptions, says Gibson. “We’re just saying, ‘hey, wait a minute.’ Particularly in a work setting, organizations, teams, and individuals may have different values and preferences.” And as this research continues, she says, people should consider that cultures can vary a lot within countries, too, especially as large numbers of people continue to migrate between countries. “We can’t make these assumptions that everybody in the United States is like this and everybody in China is like that.”

For more information about this study, please contact: Cristina Gibson cristina.gibson@uwa.edu.au

Forget chocolates and flowers, guys. If you want to make a big impression on the opposite sex, try adding red to your daily wardrobe. Lots of red.

The color apparently makes a man more attractive, more powerful and more sexually desirable to women, according to a study appearing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The research suggests that woman’s thoughts and feelings toward men are partly, primitive, a finding sure to open another chapter in the endless discussion of the perennial question `What do women want?’

Females were found to view men wearing red-colored clothing as being higher in status and more likely to earn a better living. And it was that very high-status judgment which triggered the attraction, according to according to University of Rochester Psychologist Andrew Elliot, the lead author of the study, which included co-authors from Europe and China.

“I definitely think that there’s a learned component such that one learns red is the royal color or a powerful color or a color tie that you pull out if you want to make an impression,” he said in an interview with CBSNews.com. “But that also begs the question where that came from and the cross-cultural aspects, where it’s found across cultures which otherwise have very little in common.”

Read more > Red

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

Read more > Language

The New York Times covers a fascinating story on how Japanese companies are outsourcing calls centres abroad in order to save costs. However, the companies used have no other choice other than to hire Japanese staff in order to deal with the clients at the end of the phone. Why? Because they cannot do without Japanese workers for reasons of language and culture. Even foreign citizens with a good command of the Japanese language, they say, may not be equipped with a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the manners and politesse that Japanese customers often demand.

“If you used Japanese-speaking Chinese, for example, the service quality does not match up with the expectations of the end customers,” said Tatsuhito Muramatsu, managing director at Ms. Natori’s employer, Transcosmos Thailand, a unit of Transcosmos, which is based in Tokyo.

So why are the Japanese taking these jobs? Despite earning less than 50% what they would in Japan, their money stretches a lot further in cities such as Bangkok, Beijing and Dalian.

Read more > NYT

Google have set their sites on developing their translation software. Over the years the company has clocked onto the potential the world wide web holds especially in non-English speaking countries. The launch of many innovative translation tools has already seen it trailblazing ahead of the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft in terms of engaging the world into using Google as the favoured search engine.

Google gave more insight some of its translation work in a presentation at the Wikimania conference in Poland recently. It is using Wiki material in a clever way. By using the articles and information up on the mammoth website it hopes to accomplish a couple of very important aims > a) to present content online in other languages in order to capture searches from non-English speaking countries and b) to further enhance the accuracy of their translation memory.

The two points in fact marry up to the sound of more money rolling into the Google accounts. A better translation memory means a more accurate translation of online content = higher numbers of people finding information via Google = positioning advertisements around this information = $$$.

So how does the translation memory (TM) work? Google’s translation technology begins with content in which the same text appears in multiple languages. The more examples of human translation it has, the better it works and the less often it has to fall back on machine translation. Wikipedia provides a diverse and growing body of subject matter that is ideal for the task. “In the last 16 months, Google has been working with the Wikimedia Foundation, students, professors, Google volunteers, paid translators, and members of the Wikipedia community to increase Wikipedia content in Arabic, Indic languages, and Swahili,” Google say. Tt has begun the work with Hindi, which despite having millions of speakers had only 21,000 Wikipedia articles in 2008 compared with 2.5 million in English.

Read more > Google Blog