Launch of ‘Welcoming the World’ - an initiative to help Londoners give great customer service to international visitors
London is already attracting millions of visitors every year and with the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games on the horizon, many more will come to our city. Regional Language Network London’s initiative ‘Welcoming the World’, which is funded by the London Development Agency, is helping people and businesses from across London to understand the expectations of these international visitors from a customer service point of view, and to find out a little about different countries and languages. A range of events, country profiles and a guide to dealing with visitors will help London businesses and Londoners go that extra mile.
Events
Our first one-day workshops are taking place on 7 May (Stratford) and 22 May (City Lit, Holborn) with further dates soon to be announced. Participation is free of charge for London residents. Find out more.
Guide to giving great customer service
Our downloadable guide gives tips and advice on dealing with people from different cultures – helping you to understand your own cultural view as well as other people’s. Find out more.
Country profiles
We’ve created profiles which give cultural advice on 11 different countries and territories – including China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Middle East, Poland, Russia, Spain and the USA. Find out more.
Learning Spanish is best achieved in the language’s cultural context, which is why thousands of students every year choose to study Spanish in Barcelona. University courses in this international, bicultural city are offered at a wide range of universities that place great emphasis on a quality education for today’s globalized world.
The University of Barcelona (also known as the UAB or Barcelona University) is one of the most prestigious and forward-looking educational institutions in Barcelona. Spanish courses at the UAB are available to students of all levels in standard, intensive and individual formats, and include week, month and semester-long programs.
Because of the prestige associated with these internationally recognized universities, many students consider them the best option for Spanish courses. Barcelona places great emphasis on promoting itself as a center for international studies, and much work has been done in the city to increase its appeal as such.
Thus, taking a language course in Barcelona represents a good choice for one’s education as well as for one’s future employment possibilities. Language courses in Barcelona are known and respected in international business circles, a world community that is very aware of the value of Spanish (Barcelona is arguably the world’s preferred destination for business-oriented Spanish courses).
There are also a wide range of Spanish language schools in Barcelona that offer comparable quality to that of a Spanish course in Spanish universities. Language courses at these smaller language schools often offer the advantage of increased flexibility and ease of registration.
As a city in which to have a study abroad experience, Barcelona is appealing to international students in many regards. Not only is it a large, cosmopolitan and stimulating city; it’s also graced with a coastline and numerous beautiful beaches (Madrid, in contrast, is a fantastic city but lacks this type of refreshing escape).
The historic center of the city is full of fascinating architecture and winding streets hiding charming restaurants and sidewalk cafés. Las Ramblas is one of the city’s most famous boardwalks; this wide pedestrian avenue is constantly alive with curious visitors, street performers and vendors of all types.
Nightlife is known to be excellent year-round, although it’s perhaps at its liveliest during the summer months. The city’s largest and most emblematic disco is Razzmatazz (formerly known as Sala Zeleste). Another interesting night spot is Dow Jones, a crowded bar where prices for drinks imitate the rise and fall of the stock market and can be tracked on overhead monitors.
Barcelona holds countless other sites of cultural and recreational interest, such as the world-famous Sagrada Familia cathedral and the huge and beautiful Parque Guell (both designed by the late architect Antoni Gaudi).
Getting around Barcelona is made easy by the city’s excellent and dependable public transportation system, which includes an extensive metro network that stays open until 2:00am on Friday’s and operates continuously on Saturdays. A leisurely walk through the city, however, is a pleasure that shouldn’t be overlooked. Wide streets lined with intriguing monuments and unique architecture (the hand of Gaudi is prevalent) make Barcelona one of the world’s most enjoyable cities by foot.
Lie Chan who works for Barcelona University, a website that offers Spanish courses at Barcelona University.
The Interculturale Theatre Storytelling Laboratory
Presents
the gift of diversity
Intercultural Theatre Storytelling Festival
II Edition - Rome, May 8-24 2008 The idea
Interculture means confront, exchange and communication among diverse cultures, towards an opened view and a larger dialogue between differences, against each discrimination. However, somehow, privileging interest to origins and traditions of the person that we meet - even if he is rich and amazing - and that normally we call a stranger, we may risk to forget his true particularity, maybe the most important thing: his story and not his country’s one, his experience and not his people’s one, his emotions and feelings, not his race’s one. So, we can make the mistake to build a weak and false image, a masquerade, where people are just playing roles: the African, the Chinese, the Arabian and so on. Words are important and, when concepts linked to them have a fundamental value in our life, contradictions are not possible. We are different or equal? We can’t be both, this is our provocation. If you think we are all unique, then, maybe, you could agree with the idea behind this project: the most powerful, significant and revolutionary way to have an intercultural point of view, in other words, to underline the importance of differences and richness inside our individuality, is to show the diversity of people that often think themselves as equal (not celebrating the equality of strangers…), to tell how much they are interesting to listen when they are speaking of themselves and how all become wonderful if they are so proud to mix each others.
II Edition
In May 2008 we’ll present the second edition of this festival. The last year, the first one was thought to put the bases and this time we whish to show our idea of interculture. Local or foreign artists, considering their diversity as a gift, will tell their story with their personal language or dialect. Because Italy and all countries in the world are wonderfully multicultural places even without immigrants, which are just other colours to improve the rainbow…
Almost seventy artists and companies, since North to South, sent us their proposals, convincing us that our point of view is not so crazy. After a hard selection will present nine shows from all Italy. The aim is to create a space where, thanks to Theatre Storytelling, interculture will become just culture, while actors and public will agree that diversity is the first value to celebrate.
The participants are, in order of appearance:
May 8, 9.00 p.m.: “Scantu[1]”, by and with Adele Tirante, “Cosa sono le nuvole” and “Viaggio inverso”
May 9, 9.00 p.m.: “Francesco Pileggi, the true story of a man of honour[2]”,
by and with Andrea Chianelli
May 10, 9.00 p.m.: “Calafrica[3]”, by and with Manuela Valenti
May 15, 9.00 p.m.: “Refugees”, by and with “Rataplab”
May 16, 9.00 p.m.: “Zagara”, by and with Maria Cristina Sarò
May 17, 9.00 p.m.: “It’s spring”, by and with Antonio Carletti
May 22, 9.00 p.m.: “Horrible heritage on the lake[4]”,
by and with “The differents, almost equal but different”
May 23, 9.00 p.m.: “The town of Punt”, by and with Elisa Menchicchi
May 24, 9.00 p.m. : “The true story of Jean Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, orator of the human race”,
by and with Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher and Cecilia Moreschi
The festival will be at the Studio Uno Theatre (www.studiounoteatro.it), in Rome,
Via Carlo della Rocca, 6.
The Laboratory:
The Intercultural theatre storytelling laboratory is directed by Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher (www.alessandroghebreigziabiher.it), with the precious collaboration of Cecilia Moreschi.
Dr. Geert Hofstede made a rare personal appearance as this year’s keynote speaker at ITAP International’s annual conference in Dublin, Ireland. In bridging the key gap between academic study and real world business applications, Dr. Hofstede’s presentation highlighted the vital connections between national cultures and employee satisfaction and performance, with strategic emphasis on how these cultural characteristics vary from country to country.
Hofstede was introduced by Dr. John Bing, Chairman of ITAP International, Inc. “Dr. Hofstede’s informative presentation and overall presence at the conference was a notable high point,” Bing said. “His attendance highlighted his close association with ITAP, which now goes back almost two decades. Our work together has been a matter of personal satisfaction over the years.”
As an international expert of cross-cultural comparative science, Dr. Hofstede’s ground-breaking ‘Cultures Consequences’ and its application to the workplace has been at the vanguard of international business thinking for decades.
The Canadian Tourism Commission knew exactly how to optimize its website to foreign markets. It knew that Germans prefer canoe trips, while the Japanese are fond of organized bus tours. The multilingual version of its website reflects these preferences.
“It all comes down to understanding your clients,” said Huiping Iler, chief executive of WINTranslation.com, a Web translation service in Ottawa.
But there are few examples like this one, she says. Most companies don’t bother to understand their audiences when they translate websites. Sloppily made multilingual sites either turn off international clients with bad translations or don’t show up at all in Web searches.
Take the concept of an open house for a home for sale. This is a practice unknown in many countries, yet companies nonetheless push the service on their foreign language sites, even translating the words “open house” literally.
This is not only a linguistic and cultural blunder, but it also keeps search engines from pointing to a website.
“There’s a real lack of understanding,” Iler said. “People who do marketing are often uniling
The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.
Its users around the world are translating Facebook’s visible framework into nearly two dozen languages — for free — aiding the company’s aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the United States.
The company says it’s using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines — especially terms specific to Facebook — that are in tune with local cultures.
“We thought it’d be cool,” said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook.”
Coolness aside, and many users are embracing the idea, other social networks aren’t “crowdsourcing” translation. The move is generating mounting criticism online, where some users question whether amateurs can produce good translations. Critics complain of sloppiness and skimping, even as Facebook says it is improving service in an innovative way.
The European Commission said it has approved a range of new measures designed to reduce the administrative burden for companies in Europe.
Companies will no longer need to publish business data in the national gazettes and may use translations certified in one Member State when opening branches in other Member States.
In the accounting area, parent companies without material subsidiaries will not need to prepare consolidated accounts. Furthermore medium-sized companies can be exempted from providing detailed data in the annual accounts.
A bid by French police to investigate the alleged attempt to blackmail a member of the Royal Family was hampered by their inability to speak English, a court heard yesterday.
The Royal, identified only as A, was on holiday in France when he learned that two men wanted £50,000 for an incriminating tape, it was alleged.
A’s friend, a lawyer known as C, informed Lt Arthur Maccotta. The Old Bailey heard that C phoned the two accused, Ian Strachan and Sean McGuigan, to set up a meeting in France. Lt Maccotta, giving evidence through an interpreter, said he and his boss listened in to the call. Jerome Lynch, defending, asked: “But you couldn’t understand any English?” He replied: “No, but I have full confidence in what C was saying.”
The employment gap between white and black and ethnic minority (BME) workers is closing steadily, according to a report by the TUC.
The TUC report said the employment gap had narrowed by 2.2% over the past 10 years and now stands at 15.7%.
This comes despite recent criticism of government efforts to close the gap, with accusations that some specialist schemes were wound-up too soon.
The fastest area of growth in BME employment has been part-time work, with the number doing this more than doubling in 10 years. However, just 60.1% of BME people are in work, compared to 75.8% in the wider population.
Equalities guru Trevor Phillips has called on employers to bear the cost of migrant workers’ English classes.
Forty years on from the notorious Enoch Powell speech that slated the then government’s immigration policy, the head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has said he believed “it is right” that migrants have access to free English lessons when they come to the UK to work.
Speaking to mark the 40th anniversary of Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Phillips questioned to what extent employers, migrants and settled communities should share the costs of increased immigration.
“The government has recently acknowledged this by suggesting that while English lessons might be made free for those who intend to settle here, it is right that those who come just to work – the ‘easymigrant’ – and their employers should bear the cost of their English classes. I believe that this is right.”
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