Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Kwintessential are proud to announce that following an assessment by an independent body, the company has been awarded ISO 9001 certification. The certification has only been achieved by some 5% of UK businesses and this prestigious award is supported by the Government and recognised internationally.

“We have always been proud of the service we offer. We are dedicated to offering all our clients a smooth, hassle-free and simple experience and having good systems and procedures in place is the foundation for doing so. We have long strived to ensure we have the most optimum processes in place for all our work – whether translation, interpreters, cultural awareness training or multilingual website design – and now with the award of the ISO 9001 certification, this has been confirmed by outside experts,” stated Nikki Johnson.

Read more > ISO 9001 Certificate

The complex work of modern knowledge intensive industries requires input from a variety of professions and skill sets, more than a lone worker can be expected to master. And since business is rapidly globalizing, managers can expect to work with teams whose members represent multiple cultural approaches to interpersonal relationships, work, and structures.

In such a situation, opportunities for misunderstanding and miscommunication abound, but the opportunity for magnifying the productivity of the group into deeper and more robust results is also great. What resources can a manager bring to the orchestrating of work in a multicultural team?
Approaches to Team and Group Work in Different Cultures

North American and Western Europe exemplify cultures in which individuals expect to compete, putting forth their own ideas forcefully in the expectation that others can be persuaded to go along with the one whose idea is most powerfully expressed. Such an approach to work in a group can be expected to generate a great deal of “noise”: conflict, debate and friction. Successful groups working within this paradigm will channel their competition into improving the work itself, but the obvious danger is that the conflict can become interpersonal, with emotional overtones interfering with the task at hand.

Read more > Teams

An interesting blog post about the culture of crossing roads by agents of urbanism

As virtual bridges crossing the overwhelming number of black rivers, crosswalks may someday be an anthropological resource. Within the accompanying urban signage exists a multitude of behavioral indicators.

This morning, witnessing suicidal pedestrians, I was reminded of the first time I was struck by the cultural undertones of crosswalks while committing an apparent urban faux pas in Munich.

Street-crossing would appear to be a universal system to provide safety beyond language barriers. It is a system built on common knowledge – look both ways before you cross – and universal symbols. Thus, regardless of your tongue, you should be able to achieve a high level of mobility within this system.

Perhaps it’s not so simple.

We all grow up learning and seeing these rules in action, but we do not learn the same cultural associations to this system. Some of us grow up in a car culture – as urban sprawl reigns supreme – where cultural associations favor cars, others in a neighborhood culture that favors pedestrians.

As a child of suburbia, I first became familiar with the associations of a car culture, and this is pretty much how I think pedestrians were treated ….

This video brings up three behavioral decisions.

* Do you push the button, or wait (most of the crosswalk buttons are dummies in New York.)
* In that respect, do you push the button more times to make it change faster (same goes for elevators)
* If you don’t see any cars, do you cross despite the signal

If it isn’t obvious, the last of these, is the one I am interested in. As a New York resident, I see implications of the pedestrian/car battle on a daily basis.

I first noticed a stark difference in the cultural significance of the digital boxes at crosswalks when I was in Europe. I was living in Paris, and quickly learned that you ignore the safety signs. The decision to cross or not is solely based on oncoming traffic. The city’s density diminishes the reliability on traffic lights for pedestrians. Impatient drivers, buses on schedules, taxis on the go, bikers weaving in and out of cars, none of which are guaranteed to follow the rules of the road. Therefore, one must fend for themselves. Cross at your own risk. Be ready to bolt when you hear the violent horn closing in to your right. These are the rules of Paris.

Hop on a train to Munich, and you’ll discover a different scenario.

I found myself standing at an intersection amongst six or so Germans, no cars in sight, and a static red hand across the street. I’m assuming the role of suave Parisian by now, so I dart across the street. Not sensing the herd behind me, I turn around and discover the glare of a disapproving group still standing on the other side. Tsk Tsk. Shortly the light changed, the “walking man” appeared, and the group crossed the street.

So now, I find myself wondering if there is some sort of law governing when a pedestrian can cross the street in Germany, or if I just came across a cautious bunch that did not appreciate my impatience. My unscientific experiment did not produce any concrete evidence, but did reveal the cultural habit in this German city to wait for the crosswalk signal.

Fast forward to this morning in New York City. I emerge from the subway (a system with its own etiquette ignored by many), find my bearings and approach an intersection. The digital box across the street displays a static red hand. I check for oncoming cars, see one in the distance, but decide I can make it. I make it across without having to pick up speed, but I appear to have developed a herd of followers. This is a phenomenon that happens in New York because people watch the flow of movement, not traffic signals. Not realizing the futility of this method, several pedestrians find themselves before a car barreling down the street, laying it on the horn. Fortunately, New Yorkers are alert and driver’s would rather not be inconvenienced by hitting someone.

So what do we learn from all this? Not much, relative to crosswalk laws. They are relatively the same across cities, however, watching the patterns of pedestrians and cars will shed light on urban attitudes. A dominant form of mobility may be revealed, or an intense competition between two may present itself, as we see here in New York.

Ultimately, I just enjoy considering urban conflicts, and the story they tell. From the streets of New York…

Last week, Passport mentioned a cartographic error on Newsweek’s map “The State of Islam Around the Globe”: Rather than marking the Palestinian Territories (the West Bank and Gaza) it labeled Israel as such.

While this is a sure fumble, it is easily changed. More problematic is that the map only includes 15 “Muslim” countries, concentrated in the Middle East and Central Asia. Only Nigeria, Indonesia and the Philippines break the mold. But even still here, the Philippines cannot be called a “Muslim country” with a straight face. It’s population is barely 5% Muslim. The struggle in the southern part of the country raises the community’s profile, but this still does not make it a Muslim country and it is disappointing that the Philippines is included in the tally but countries such as, say, Malaysia, Sudan, Mali, Senegal, Tunisia, Gambia or Bangladesh are not. This paucity of valuable information is the most troubling part of the map, not that a small country, with a small number of people is mislabeled on a map that is easily corrected.

The government has launched a recruitment campaign targeting ethnic minorities and women to help the Fire Service reach its new equality targets.

Earlier this month the Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) agreed to targets demanding that by 2013, 15% of all recruits to the operational sector are women – an increase from the 2008 recruitment figure of 9.2% – and that the proportion of ethnic minority staff is representative of the local community.

A report by the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) had revealed that just 5% of FRS employees were from an ethnic minority background, while just 3.3% of operational staff were female.

The new campaign is designed to change attitudes and perceptions towards a career with the force – focusing specifically on women and ethnic minority groups – rather than the development of a national recruitment campaign.

The exact nature of the campaign is still under discussion but it will run across a range of media platforms, including advertising, online and events.

Read more > Fire Service

Even in a recession, companies have to talk to their customers. And global companies have to do it in dozens of languages.

As e-commerce and corporate websites become more complicated, with greater use of video and graphics, translation services are becoming increasingly complicated and costly. At the same time, more and more companies are pushing into emerging markets.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Mark Lancaster, chief executive of SDL, the Berkshire-based translation technology group that will enter the FTSE 250 next week, is predicting growth amid the economic gloom.

In his Maidenhead office, Mr Lancaster says: “Everybody is being cautious [about the economic climate]. But businesses will not stop communicating on the web. And companies will have to innovate to succeed in this market and if they innovate then those product launches will need translation.”

Already the world’s largest supplier of translation services and technologies following an aggressive expansion and acquisition strategy, SDL has grown from a 1992 start-up with £45,000 ($63,000) seed capital to employing more than 1,800 people in 50 offices across 32 countries. The company has announced record revenue of £158.7m and profits before tax and amortisation up 50 per cent to £25.5m for 2008, ahead of market expectations.

Read more > SDL

Transcultural nursing with established clinical approached to clients with varying cultures are relatively new. According to Madeleine Leininger (1987) founder of the filed of transcultural nursing in the mid 1960s. The education of nursing students in this field is only now beginning to yield  significant results.

Today  nurses with a deeper appreciation of human life and values are developing cultural sensitivity for appropriate individualized clinical approaches.

Religious and Cultural knowledge is an important ingredient in health care. If the client do not respond as nurse expects the nurse may interpret it as unconcern or resistance the nurse then can be anxious and frustrated in order to incorporate cultural knowledge in care cultural knowledge in care.

It is important to understand some definition and cultural components that are important in health care.

For a nurse to successfully provide care for a client of a different cultural or ethnic to background, effective intercultural communication must take place. Intercultural communication occurs when each person attempts to understand the other’s point of   view from his or her own cultural frame of reference. Effective intercultural communication is facilitated by the nurse identification of areas of commonalities. After reaching a cultural. understanding, the nurse must consider cultural factor throughout the nursing process.

Major Nursing organizations have emphasized in the last decade the importance of considering culture factors when delivering nursing care.

According to the American Nurses’ s Association (1976)”Consideration of individual value systems and lifestyles should be included in the planning and health care for each client Nursing curriculum recognize the contribution nursing to the health care needs of a diverse and multi cultural society life-style may ret1ect cultural heritage.

Culture-Broadly defines set of values, beliefs and traditions, that are held by a specific group of people and handed down from generation to generation. Culture is also beliefs, habits, likes, dislikes, customs and rituals learn from one’s family. (Specter 1991)

Culture is the learned, shared and transmitted values, beliefs, norms and life way practices of a particular group that guide thinking, decisions, and actions in patterned ways.

Religion:  Is a set of belief in a divine or super human power (or powers) to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator and ruler of the universe? Ethical values and religion system of beliefs and practices, difference within the culture and across culture are found

Ethnic: refers to a group of people who share a common and distinctive culture and who are members of a specific group.

Culture-universals: commonalities of values, norms of behavior, and life patterns that are similar among different cultures.

Culture-specifies ; values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that tend to be unique to a designate culture.

Cultural shock:-the state of being disoriented or unable to respond to a different cultural environment because of its sudden strangeness, unfamiliarity, and incompatibility to the stranger’s perceptions and expectations at is differentiated from others by symbolic markers (cultures, biology, territory, religion).

Read more > Nursing

NOËL Coward once travelled by passenger liner from Shanghai to London and on an economy class flight back to Melbourne from London with my family after a Christmas/New Year break, I found myself reading his poetic account of the trip, P&O 1930, in his Collected Verse.

Long-haul flights are a drawback of expat life and hauls don’t come much longer than England to Australia. The contrast between Coward’s descriptions of 1930s shipboard life, with its concerts, intrigues and dressing for dinner at the captain’s table, and the cattle truck reality of modern travel made it far from ideal reading for someone who had just heaved their luggage off the carousel.

Of course, comparing a 1930s P&O liner and an A380 “Super Jumbo” in 2009 is to rather miss the point, for over recent decades travel has been democratised. In Noel’s era, most of us would have been stuck in a terraced house, our experience of the world limited to the BBC Home Service. The fact remains, though, that air travel, when measured by most yardsticks, is not overly pleasant. Some dislikes – the food, the toilet facilities and “destroying the planet” – can probably be taken as givens, but here are a few other pet hates you may or may not share.

• Arriving at check in and asking for one of the seats with the extra legroom (I am over six feet tall) by the emergency exit. I am then informed that they are all taken. On boarding the plane, I invariably find them occupied by smug-looking short people.

• Couples (always couples) with 10 pieces of hand luggage, each obviously bigger than regulations allow. They then spend 10 minutes trying to get them into the overhead lockers, all the while discussing it in loud voices, while the rest of us wait to get past.

• The baggage carousel, which always delivers my bags last, regardless of whether I have checked in early, late, or in between.

• The map of the flight path. Some years ago, when my son was at boarding school in Suffolk, I noticed how the frequent drives from Surrey were made worse when I started to recognise minor landmarks: “I’ve just passed that McDonald’s on the A12 near Ipswich so there’s another 53 minutes to go.” The flight path on the “in-flight entertainment unit” allows you to indulge in a more worldly version: “We’re just passing Uzbekistan so it’s another six hours to the stopover in Hong Kong.”

Read more > The Telegraph

The following is an extract from Waxy.org – the sandbox of Andy Baio, an independent journalist and programmer living in Portland, Oregon.

While researching Oscar screeners last month, I stumbled on a remarkable example of online collaboration in China that’s completely undiscovered here. In short, a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience.

It reminds me of the scanlation movement, in which groups of fans scan, translate, and redistribute manga into another language. But I’ve never seen it applied to a newspaper or magazine, especially one as high-minded as The Economist.

It’s an impressive example of online collaboration with simple tools, a completely non-commercial effort by volunteers interested in spreading knowledge while improving their English skills. In the process, they’re taking a political risk in translating controversial articles about their homeland behind the Great Firewall.

I can’t read Chinese, but with the help of Google’s translation tools and several Chinese-speaking friends, I think I’ve pieced it together. (If anyone out there knows more, please email or IM me and I’ll add it in.)

Read more > Economist in Chinese

Losing your job anywhere is disorienting, but imagine being laid off when you work in a foreign country. Not only is your source of income, and perhaps a good part of your identity, suddenly yanked away, but often you lose your right to remain in the country.

Sandra Johnson, left, president of the Kensington and Chelsea Women’s Club in London, said membership was dropping. International recruiters like Sonamara Jeffreys in London, right, say that laid-off Americans with 30 days to leave Britain are looking for jobs back home.

Add to that urgent disruption the calamity of a collapsing industry and you have the life more or less of thousands of American expatriates in banking and finance.

The archetype of the young international banker cut one of the most dashing figures of the age of globalization. Well-educated and well-connected, able to take their pick of jobs, they skipped across employers like they did countries for weekend getaways.

As recently as last fall, financial professionals who lost their jobs as Wall Street bled could hope for new positions overseas. But layoffs have spread quickly from New York to Europe and now to the Mideast and Asia, leaving a growing number of jobless expats, as they are known, with few places to turn and either stranded or forced to return home.

A rhyming refrain among laid-off bankers a few months ago — “Try Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai” — now seems hopelessly dated. Financial markets in all three cities have crashed.

Read more > Bankers