Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Facts and Statistics

Location: Eastern Europe, bordering the Baltic Sea, between Estonia and Lithuania
Capital: Riga
Climate: maritime; wet, moderate winters
Population: 2,259,810 (July 2007 est.)
Ethnic Make-up: Latvian 57.7%, Russian 29.6%, Belarusian 4.1%, Ukrainian 2.7%, Polish 2.5%, Lithuanian 1.4%, other 2% (2002)
Religions: Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox
Government: parliamentary democracy

Language in Latvia

The official language of Latvia is Latvian, which belongs to the Baltic language group of the Indo-European language family. Another notable language of Latvia is the nearly extinct Livonian language of Baltic-Finnic sub-branch of Uralic language family, which enjoys protection by law. The Latgalian language (a dialect of Latvian) is also protected by Latvian law as historical variation of Latvian language. Russian is by far the most widespread minority language.

Read more > Latvia 

The war for talent never ends. Middle managers in China? Good luck finding them, let alone keeping them. Assembly line workers in Central Europe? They’re well-educated and hard-working: Trouble is, every company wants them. The cubicle warriors of Bangalore? They get the job done—if they stick around. I For corporations, managing this widely scattered, talented, restive, multicultural workforce has never been harder. This Special Report, written to coincide with the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, brings readers to the front lines of the struggle. It delves into IBM’s (IBM) effort to rein- vent the way it gets tasks done around the world, follows a Nokia (NOK) manager as he recruits a workforce from scratch in Transylvania, meets a restless generation of IT workers in India, and hears from the corporate road warriors who never, ever stop traveling.

These and other stories make a simple but powerful point: The old way of managing across borders is fading fast. In the first half of the 20th century, the globalization of business was based on the British colonial model. Headquarters, functions, and capital were in one place, with managers dispatched to run regional operations like colonies. In the second half of the 1900s, companies adopted the multinational model, replicating their home country operations in other places where they did business. Country units rarely dealt with other divisions in other markets.

Today, global corporations are transforming themselves into “transnationals,” moving work to the places with the talent to handle the job and the time to do it at the right cost.

Read more: transnationals 

When Rogerio Oliveira strolls through the vast IBM (IBM) service delivery center in Hortolandia, Brazil, the contrast between the old and new IBM is stark. What was once a factory for mainframes is now crowded with hundreds of Brazilians on a different sort of assembly line. Their output is information, and they sit in rows of cubicles that stretch the length of a football field under a soaring, metal-trussed roof. A few years ago, the factory work performed here was just for Brazilian customers. Today, 100 clients for the facility’s services, which range from software programming to financial accounting, come from 40 countries, including Canada, Mexico, South Africa, and the U.S.

Oliveira, a 35-year IBM veteran and general manager for Latin America, stands at the heart of IBM’s effort to transform itself into what it calls a “globally integrated enterprise.” IBM has talked about its new global vision for two years. But only recently have managers like Oliveira turned that vision into a practical and solidly profitable business.

Read more > Business Week 

Intercultural competence is the key to the continued success of India’s businesses in an increasingly globalised world, according Lakshmi Narayanan, Chairman of Cognizant Technology and Chairman of NASSCOM.Building a successful global enterprise involves creating a global mindset that goes beyond breaking down the walls between local country offices and international headquarters, or overseas revenues and product sales. Instead, he said, it is about creating an integrated workforce that is multiculturally aligned.

Addressing a conference of the Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research (SIETAR), he stressed the importance of experience, travel or training in building that global mindset. “Talent is the most important commodity. Capital, products, everything else is mobile. But talent is context sensitive. It is not possible to take people with the right capabilities in say technology, plant them somewhere and expect them to succeed.”

Read more > Narayanan 

The European Commission is offering translation software developers free access to around one million sentences translated between 22 of the European Union’s 23 official languages. It hopes the data will help improve the quality of a variety of language tools, including grammar and spelling checkers, online dictionaries and machine translators — particularly in less well-served languages such as Latvian or Romanian.

The sentences are mostly drawn from the “Acquis Communautaire,” the body of law that must be implemented by all new E.U. member states, and include the treaties, directives and regulations adopted by the E.U., and rulings from the European Court of Justice.

Read more > EU 

French car-maker Citroen has apologized to China for running a full-page advertisement in several Spanish newspapers featuring a poster of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong pulling a wry face at a sporty hatch-back.

Under the Biblical quotation “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” the text talked up Citroen’s position as a car sales leader in a bombastic tone. “It’s true, we are leaders, but at Citroen the revolution never stops,” the advertisement said.

“We are once more going to put in motion all the machinery of our technological ability, in order to repeat in 2008 the successes obtained in previous years,” it added. The Mao poster is similar to the huge painting of the Great Helmsman gazing out over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, except that it has been distorted to show lips screwed up and eyes squinting.

“The image has been wantonly distorted by the ad’s designers. Mao looks very strange,” Chinese state newspaper the Global Times observed Tuesday. The scowling Mao had infuriated Chinese Internet users who saw it as a slight, it said.
“As a Chinese, I felt greatly insulted when seeing this ad,” a posting on web portal Tianya (www.tianya.com) said. “It is not only insulting Chairman Mao, but the whole Chinese nation.” “Chairman Mao is the symbol of China, and what Citroen did lacks basic respect to China,” another posting said.

Read more > Citroen

Three Korean films and a cartoon have been translated for immigrant workers and foreigners married to Koreans here. About 10 immigrants from Southeast Asian countries participated in the translation project to help people settle down in Korea more easily.

Cultural Action (CA), a non-profit civic organization, organized the translation project, which it pursued in cooperation with a cartoon company and the Association of Korea Independent Film & Video funded by the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs.

Read more > Korea 

Sign Language for Babies

Recent trends have seen a move towards the use of sign language with babies and more and more parents are embracing this practice as an opportunity to develop communication and interaction with their baby.

The following article presents some key facts related to the practice of baby sign language:

What is Baby Sign Language?

Baby sign language is the practice of signing with babies prior to the acquisition of verbal speech. As an example, a young baby would be unable to verbally generate the relevant language to tell you that he/she was hungry and as such, the parent would need to interpret a series of cries and protestations to arrive at this realisation. However, a baby who as acquired the use of baby sign language would be able to make a simple sign relating to hunger which is easily interpreted and understood by the parent.

Read more > Baby Sign Language 

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SIETAR India, (Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research) will host its two-day Second Annual Conference here on January 19.

The theme of the conference is “From the Melting Pot to the Salad Bowl” that will delve into the area of intercultural communication and its relevance to the world we live in.

In this context, a pre-conference workshop ‘Designing Training Games’ will be organised by Dr. Sivasailam Thiagarajan.

It is the world’s largest interdisciplinary network in the field of intercultural relations.

SIETAR India invites management and HR professionals, international business heads and students to attend this workshop to gain new insights into the field of intercultural communication and global leadership.

The conference strives to promote intercultural dialogue between people of different cultures.

Eminent speakers at the conference include intercultural practitioners, researchers and trainers who will discuss a range of subjects varying from “Snapshots of Indian Culture“, “Expatriation challenges faced by Indian families” to “HR Trends in a Globalized World”.

Lakshmi Narayanan, Chairman of Cognizant Technology Solutions would be the guest of honor for the conference.

SIETAR India launched in 2006, coupled with the First Annual Conference at Bangalore, witnessed a whooping figure of 100 delegates from various parts of the world to share their deep insights about their culture and research on the same