Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Tourism can play a key role in advancing understanding among cultures, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today.

“In a global environment marked by rising intolerance and cross-cultural tensions, often exacerbated by the economic divide between nations, tourism can foster spiritual and cultural respect among and between peoples, while creating economic opportunities to benefit disadvantaged populations,” he said in a message to the International Conference on Tourism, Religions and the Dialogue of Cultures.

The three-day Conference, which is taking place in Cordoba, Spain, has been convened by the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), which became the world body’s newest specialized agency in 2003.Read more> Conference 

If you travel, particularly to places off the tourist trail, a sense of cultural disorientation will often overtake you. You’ll find yourself in situations where the rules are totally different and making a string of faux pas is all too easy. At a barbecue in rural Australia, I remember thinking I was doing fine, standing at one end of the garden bantering with the women. It was only when the shouts of, “Hey, are you trying to chat up my missus?!” were repeated several times that I began to understand that Down Under, in the sticks at least, you talk to the fellers.

In the West of Ireland one Boxing Day, I expressed a rather shocked surprise at the enthusiasm with which the old guys at the bar were awaiting the arrival of the “rent boys”. It was only when a bunch of young men dressed up as birds turned up that I found out about the fine old Irish tradition of the Wren Boys.

Read more> The Independent 

AOL today announced the next steps in its ambitious global expansion effort with the launch of new local language versions of the AOL India portal, http://www.aol.in, and the launch of Truveo’s popular video search engine serving eight countries, including India.

“India is a very important market for AOL, and these announcements show our commitment to serving online consumers here with a robust portal and industry leading video search tools,” said Ron Grant, President and COO of AOL. “These are also important steps in our ongoing efforts to make AOL a truly global company. We started this year with three international portals in Europe, and we will end 2008 with a presence in 30 countries around the world.”

AOL.in is launching content channels in the Hindi and Tamil languages, improving the breadth of AOL’s offerings at a time when the online audience in India is skyrocketing. The number of Internet users in urban India has grown by 28% in the past year, and about 60% of all active online Indians (30 million) prefer to read in local Indian languages.* The Hindi and Tamil language portals will have language sections in News, Cinema and Astrology.Read more> AOL 

Arpan Sharma has an extraordinary linguistic talent. He can speak in 11 different tongues and is only 10 years old.

Aside from English, Arpan speaks Hindi, which he picked up from his teacher parents, and, at school, he learnt Italian when he was seven, German at the age of eight, Spanish at nine, and French last term.

He also speaks Thai, Swahili, Polish, Chinese Mandarin and is currently studying the difficult Lugandan language of Uganda. Staff at the 560-pupil, fee-paying Blue Coat’s School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, described his talents as “extraordinary”.Read more> Arpan 

MySpace, the popular social networking site has announced plans to roll out a Russian language version to capitalise on the country’s fast-growing Internet advertising business.

Alexa currently ranks MySpace in 55th place in Russia but analysts say their competitive advantage lies in coming to a market with mainly weak players. According to Konstantine Belov, media analyst at UralSib, another factor in their favour would be their established brand and well-honed technology. Russia’s social networking market is currently dominated by Yandex owned, MoiKrug (”My Circle”) and Vkontakte.ru.

Vitaly Kupeyev, an analyst at AlfaBank, said that although the online advertising market being targetted by MySpace was a fast growing segment, it still only makes up 2% of the market. “A lot depends on MySpace’s marketing strategies”, Kupeyev said. “The projection for Internet advertising for 2012 is a mere 5% of the total ad market”,

Read more> My Space 

Communities secretary Hazel Blears has urged human resources professionals to get out more to attract more black and minority ethnic (BME) workers.

Speaking exclusively to Personneltoday.com, Blears said the role for HR in attracting more BME people into work was to go to the places where different communities live, and encourage them to apply for positions.

Currently, the ethnic minority share of the working age population stands at 9.3% or 3.26 million people, according to 2004 Department for Work and Pensions figures. The latest Office for National Statistic figures (2002-03) state that the employment rate for white people working in the UK is 75.5%, compared to just 57.3% for non-white groups.

Read more> Hazel Blears