Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Let’s begin with a joke.The United Nations sent out a worldwide survey. The request: Please give your honest opinion about possible solutions to end the food shortage in the rest of the world.

That survey has been a disaster.

In Africa, nobody understood the meaning of food.

In Eastern Europe, nobody understood the meaning of honest.

In Western Europe, nobody understood the meaning of shortage.

In China, nobody understood the meaning of give your opinion.

In the Middle East, nobody understood the meaning of solution.

And in the United States, nobody understood the rest of the world.

The joke presents a number of intercultural stereotypes and dangerous preconceived ideas… But where there’s smoke there’s fire.

A recent bitter clash between French giant Danone (which makes Evian bottled water, among other products) and its Chinese Joint-Venture partner showed once again that even world-leading companies underestimate the importance of studying foreign cultures before implementing business development plans abroad. As the imaging industry continues to expand globally, intercultural relations will be a key to smooth relations. The American machine vision market, for example, is expected to grow by 17 percent this year, Europe by 3 percent and the rest of the world and Asia by 14 percent. The global machine vision market was $8.1 billion in 2006 and expected to grow to more than $15 billion by 2012.

Read more > Doing Business Abroad

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Intercultural & Cross-Cultural News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.