Intercultural Communication and Translation News

A Welsh police authority yesterday called on the Home Office to provide extra funding to meet the spiralling cost of employing interpreters.

The demand came as it was revealed the amount being spent by some Welsh forces on providing translation services has risen by up to 200% in three years.

An influx of migrant workers from Eastern Europe and the Iberian peninsula has been blamed for the a sharp rise in costs for forces across the country.

Last week the Thames Valley Police Authority said the money it spent on interpreters had risen by more than £920,000 in a decade.

Read more: Wales 

In the book, “The World is Flat,” By Thomas L. Friedman, the author famously writes, “‘Honey,’ I confided, ‘I think the world is flat.’”

With the onslaught of rapid globalisation, high-quality executive mobility has become more critical than ever for the success of many US companies. Nevertheless, many companies continue to struggle to make their international assignments effective.

A well-developed global mobility program must cover a comprehensive range of complex issues, such as housing, children’s education, and income taxes. In addition, many companies now are investing in family counselling and in cultural and language training with good results. These issues offer many opportunities for continual improvement and, fortunately, experts and service providers now are available to help.

However, while these are important issues for success, in the end, these issues deal with administrative policy, process, and financial costs. They do not address the effectiveness of the assignment. Global mobility programs—and the managers responsible for them—must be aligned with the overall business goals.

Read more: Success Abroad 

In another cross cultural howler to cherish, Spanish fashion chain Zara has withdrawn a handbag from its stores after a customer in Britain complained swastikas were embroidered on it.

Zara, owned by the world’s second largest fashion retailer Inditex, said it did not know the 39 pound ($78) handbag had green swastikas on its corners.

The bags were made by a supplier in India and inspired by commonly used Hindu symbols, which include the swastika. The original design approved by Zara did not have swastikas on it, Inditex said.

“After the return of one bag we decided to withdraw the whole range,” said a spokesman for Inditex, which has more than 3,330 stores in 66 countries.

Read more: Zara 

A Malaysian diplomat has apologized to the Iraqi government after he mistook a box of sweet pickles sent to him as Ramadan gift for anthrax powder, a newspaper said on Saturday.

The incident has sparked a protest from Baghdad, with its envoy to Malaysia expressing displeasure over the diplomat’s “panic-stricken behavior.”

“It is such a special sweet, and this year I wanted to show my appreciation to the Malaysian government, the ministry and my friends,” the New Straits Times quoted Iraq’s charge d’affaires, Hoshiar Dazayi, as saying.

He said the diplomat’s apology still fell short of an official apology from the Malaysian government.Read more: Iraqi Pickles 

Workers in France protesting against companies who have made English the dominant language in the workplace are successfully invoking a law that mandates the use of their native language in official documents.

The law, known as La loi Toubon after the government minister who piloted it, has led to one firm, General Electric Medical Systems, being fined Euros 580,000 (£406,000) for failing to translate company documents into French.

Read more: Language 

One of the world’s 7,000 distinct languages disappears every 14 days, an extinction rate exceeding that of birds, mammals or plants, researchers said Tuesday.

At least 20% of the world’s languages are in imminent danger of becoming extinct as their last speakers die off, compared with about 18% of mammals, 8% of plants and 5% of birds.

The extinction of a language translates into a loss of knowledge, said K. David Harrison, associate director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and a linguist at Swarthmore College.

Read more: D. Harrison

Search engine company, Google, has developed and released a new tool in its Google Translate application, as a cross-language search feature.

The new feature is available in the following languages: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), and Chinese (Simplified).

Read more: Google 

“Public dangerously misled by online translation services,” reads the article from the L&L translation agency. In response to Microsoft launching their latest free online translation, the agency put out the usual examples of how translation software doesn’t always get it right. Yet these voices seem to be missing the whole point of these tools; they are not designed and offered as accurate translations that can be relied upon. Even Kwintessential’s free online translation tool comes with a warning that the wording will never be 100% accurate.

The point of the translation tools is to simply offer the user a rough or “gist” translation of a source text, nothing else. By doing so these free tools  at least help people understand the meaning of an email, a web page or any anything else in a foreign language they can’t understand. It is for this reason that such online translation tools should be seen as a positive addition to the world wide web.

The power of ethnic audiences is apparent in everyday life. But inherent risks exist when messaging previously meant for a minority group becomes part of the mainstream.

In its fourth year, the just-released Yankelovich Monitor Multicultural Marketing Study points to the impact of the “commercialization of culture,” or repeated use of certain cultural elements to reach broader audiences. In 2004, 37 percent of non-Hispanic whites thought Hispanics were influencing everyone’s lifestyle; today, it’s 44 percent.

The result may mean less authentic messaging for Hispanics and African Americans, the study reports, if the same marketing strategies are used to reach ethnic consumers. “We’re calling it cultural pinpointing. It’s about understanding that today there’s a lot of borrowing going on from the ethnic marketplace,” said Sonya Suarez-Hammond, vice president of multicultural insights for Yankelovich in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Read more: Cultural pinpointing 

NATO should urgently step up the teaching of English to Afghan army officers so they can work alongside international forces there, the general coordinating allied training efforts said Monday.”The biggest problem that we meet is language skills,” said Brig. Gen. Ryszard Wisniewski. “The Afghan National Army has a lot of needs starting with the basic language skills to get more and better relationships and communication between allies and Afghans.”

Read more: Afghanistan

Editor’s note: Interesting that the Afghans should learn English rather than the NATO troops learn Dari or Pashtu?!