Intercultural Communication and Translation News

The Steinke Institute in Bonn has developed a Language Index that extrapolates the gross national product for all the countries of the world to the year 2025, and converts this into a value relevant for their respective languages. The most significant results from the Steinke Language Index are as follows.

Even in 2025, English will still easily maintain its position as the Chinese soon to be second most important language for business most important foreign language, whose study is essential for career success. Chinese occupies the second place. The following places from three to ten are taken by Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese and Korean. Three of the Top 10 most important languages are thus from the Far East. Measured on growth of importance from today to 2025, the following languages are also making strong progress: Turkish, Hindi, Polish, Rumanian, Farsi, Thai and also Vietnamese.

Read more: Chinese 

Universal search and automated translation are big parts of Google Inc.’s future, a company executive said Friday in Beijing.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president, search products and user experience, said Google had invested in automatic translation as a way to improve search results across various languages. “CLIR (cross language information retrieval) is better if we can search all the Web pages in every language and return the best search results,” she said at a Google “product salon” in the Chinese capital.

Read more: Google 

US officials say the military is transforming to meet the changing face of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. BBC Arabic’s Roula Ayoubi reports on a new “cultural training” programme to improve US soldiers’ skills in dealing with local people.

“Assalamu alaykum, Ahlan wa sahlan, welcome.” With these words, Iraqi sheikhs greet a group of marines in a narrow room at the beginning of a training session.

The class is part of “Mojave Viper”, a new pre-deployment cultural training course established to prepare US forces for what the military calls “irregular warfare” in Iraq.

The meeting starts with a prayer suggested by the group’s Iraqi interpreter, who wears a marine uniform.

Read more: Iraq 

France is the latest country to allow family members of skilled international staff to work during an assignment. The changes, which apply to intra-group transfers and a new category for `competences and talents’, were part of the 2006 Immigration and Integration Law, implemented in May 2007.

The change is applauded by Permits Foundation, which promotes open work permits for the spouses and partners of international staff worldwide.

Read more: France 

The publication of a new book that will showcase interpreters and their contributions to society was announced today. “From Our Lips to Your Ears: How Interpreters are Changing the World” marks the first published compendium of stories about this unique and complex profession from the perspective of interpreters themselves.

“Millions of people throughout the world communicate each day without sharing a common language,” explained Nataly Kelly, editor of the publication. “This book shines a light on the unsung heroes that enable much of this communication to take place.”

Read more:  From Our Lips to Your Ears

IBM and BEA Systems have proposed an open source globalization project at the Eclipse Foundation that would feature a set of tools to make it easier to translate Eclipse projects into many languages.

Called the Eclipse Babel Project, the effort would translate selected projects into languages such as French, Japanese, German and other languages. Tools and activities to enable Eclipse deliverables to run in multiple locales also are part of the plan.

Read more: Eclipse Babel 

A study of newborn babies and preschoolers has revealed that language may be the root of prejudice - and the way to avoid it.

US and French researchers have found that the language babies hear spoken in their first six months of life leads to a preference for speakers of that language. The preference is so entrenched that by age five youngsters prefer playmates who not only speak the same language but do so with the same accent. A key implication of the findings - reported in the US publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Science - is that children exposed to different languages grow into more tolerant adults than their monolingual mates.

Linguist Stephen Crain of Sydney’s Macquarie University  tended to agree: “I’ve always thought it would be beneficial to expose our children to more than one language,” he said.

Read more: Polyglots 

When a Japanese reporter recently asked Roger Clemens for an autograph, he got a signed photo and a swift penalty: His membership in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America was revoked.

Hiroki Homma of the Fuji Evening News said he didn’t realize he was breaking the rules, though he took full responsibility and apologized to the New York Yankees. “I didn’t know,” Homma told The Associated Press. “It was my fault.” Ballplayers coming from Japan to the majors need to make adjustments. So, too, do the many international journalists covering the big leagues. Clubhouse etiquette is just one example of the many cultural changes they face.

Read more: Baseball

John Yunker has come out with a nice little report called “What if the world were 100 people”. Some of his conclusions include:

>> How many of these people have Internet access?

Of these 100 people, only 16 currently have Internet access.

Here’s where they live:

> 6 live in Asia
> 5 live in Europe
> 3 live in North America
> 1 lives in Latin America
> 1 lives in “Rest of World”

>> What languages do they speak?

Of the 16 people with Internet access, here’s how they are represented by their native languages:

> 5 speak English
> 2 speak Chinese
> 1 speaks Japanese
> 1 speaks Spanish
> 7 speak “Rest of World” languages

Read the full report here.

Nintendo has been forced to withdraw a computer game from sale in the UK because it contains the word ’spastic’ in its script.

Mario Party 8, a multi-player game for the Wii console, went on sale in the UK on Friday but was taken off the shelves after the mistake was discovered.

In the game, designed to be played by groups at parties, a blue wizard called Kamek appears on screen and intones: “Magikoopa Magic! Turn the train, spastic! Make this ticket tragic!”

Games experts said that computer game translation – like film dubbing – was prone to errors because translation services often did not take account of the meaning of words in particular cultures.

Read more: Nintendo