Intercultural Communication and Translation News

In his  14-year career as an industrial and electrical engineer, Carlos Founaud has worked or done business in Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal, Germany, Britain, Australia, and Italy before returning to his native Spain.

“I called myself a multicultural interface,” he laughs. “If something broke down, the Spanish way was to focus on the problem—let’s have a look, make a decision, and do it. The Austrian way was to find out who’s guilty. The British way was to open the manuals and find the different procedures for fixing it—and afterward go to the pub.”

Founaud has found that this multicultural approach to problem solving, while maddening at times, has also made him better at his job. Now general managing director of iA Soft Aragón, a Saragossa firm that develops public administration software, he seeks out foreign programmers specifically to challenge the procedural mind-set on his home turf.

Foreign postings often offer more autonomy and responsibility, a faster pace, higher pay, and tax breaks, as well as the adventure of foreign lands and languages. The posts can also improve your skills.

Read more > Skills

Climate change, rising sea levels, depleted natural resources, shrinking rainforest and a plethora of other reasons have pushed the green agenda to the top of political discourse.

President Obama has pledged billions towards investing in green technologies as part of tackling climate change as well as re-energising the US economy in the wake of the credit crunch.

Worldwide both small and large companies are starting to realise exciting and realistic means of creating energy through alternative, natural and less harmful means.

Not many of our clients know that we have a dedicated team of “green” translators (not literally!). As a compay we have long been dedicated to doing our bit for the environment and stemming from this we decided to invest in developing translation services for the green industries.

For more information please visit > Green Technologies Translation

Berlin has launched a new “friendliness” campaign to keep tourists flocking to the German capital during a time of economic crisis.

With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall looming in November and the World Championships in athletics due in August, police, street cleaners, airport staff and taxi drivers have begun wearing special red pins to signal to visitors that they are ready to lend a helping hand.

The campaign, launched this week by the city government and local companies, mirrors a friendliness drive that was launched back in 2006 when Germany hosted the soccer World Cup.

“Berlin has a reputation in Germany of being a rude city, but we’re a rude city with a heart,” said Rene Gorka, head of Berlin Partners, a marketing group that promotes the city.

Read more > Berlin

Geeta Gwalani explores how the optimum use of technology can be achieved in the context of global mobility programs of organisations.

The use of information technology within human resource (HR) management has increased greatly during recent years, with most organisations now using technology to some extent in their management of HR.

Some believe that HR practitioners have become more focused on adding strategic value within an organisation and becoming a business partner to line managers. A number of authors have suggested that technology may be used within HR to facilitate this shift in the role of the HR function, including Edward Lawler and Susan Mohrman in their 2003 Human Resource Planning article, ‘HR as a Strategic Partner: What Does it Take to Make it Happen,’ and Samir Shrivastava and James Shaw in their 2003 Human Resource Management article, ‘Liberating HR through Technology.’ However, HR functions also have been under pressure to reduce costs and make efficiency savings, sometimes achieved by outsourcing parts of the function, but often through streamlining the transactional aspects of the work by means of call centres, self-service, and a greater use of new technology.

The use of technology within HR has increased rapidly during recent years, with 77 percent of organisations using some form of HRIS in 2005, according to a paper published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Read more > Mobility

People from ethnic minority groups could receive additional financial support as a result of government fears they will be hardest hit during the recession.

At Labour’s Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic annual general meeting in Leicester, work and pensions secretary James Purnell announced an initiative to ensure that no ethnic minority worker would be “left behind”.

Purnell warned that employment levels among people from ethnic minorities fell by 10% in the last recession, and said it was important to ensure such mistakes were not repeated.

“In the past too many were left behind in bad times. Ethnic minority workers suffered most in the Tory recessions,” he said.

Mr Purnell said the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) had agreed to work with the government to assess whether any groups were suffering disproportionately in the recession, and to advise ministers about corrective measures.

Read more > HR News

Persian (Farsi)

Within the Iranian branch of indo-European languages, Persian is a member of the West Iranian group. The three main dialects of Persian consist of that spoken in Iran (also called Farsi), the Persian of Afghanistan (commonly known as Dari) and the Persian spoken in some of the ex-Soviet central Asian states including Tajikistan.

Iran is a multilingual country where although Farsi is the official language, there are large communities of speakers of other languages such as Arabic, Kurdish and Turkic dialects.

Origins of the Persian Language

The evolution of Persian as the culturally dominant language from Iran to Central Asia to north-western India began with the political domination of these areas by dynasties originating in the south-western province of Iran.  Parsa, later Arabicised to Fars, was ruled by two dynasties: the Achaemenids (559-331bc) whose official language was Old Persian, then the Sassanids (225 -651 AD) who spoke middle Persian. Hence the entire country used to be called Perse by the ancient Greeks, a practice still continued by some today. The name Iran derives from Old Iranian aryanam ‘the realm of the Aryans’.

Standardisation of Persian

Persian appeared fairly standardised first in early poetic diction, which showed few dialectal variations by the tenth century. Nevertheless, the peculiarities of eastern poets led to the compilation of dictionaries explaining those in common Persian.

The formative period for prose writing lasted until the end of the twelfth century where religious, scientific, historical and philosophical texts paid less attention to high style than to reaching the public. By the thirteenth century the regionally marked features had largely disappeared in poetry and prose.

The dominance of classical Persian continued until the beginning of the nineteenth century when new political and cultural conditions brought about under European influence sponsored gradual simplification in style.  This brought the acceptance in writing of standard educated speech developed in Tehran, first through journalism, followed by prose and finally poetry.

Colonial Persian

Persian was cultivated at the courts of the Ottoman rulers, several of whom are known for composing Farsi poetry. Urdu also developed under heavy Persian influence. Persian first entered India with the conquest of North West India by Ghaznavid armies in the eleventh century. Four centuries later, Persian was chosen as the court language by the Mogul rulers, who were major patrons of Persian literature, unlike the contemporary Safavids in Iran. It was at the courts of India and Turkey where many of the major traditional dictionaries of Persian were compiled from the mid tenth to the eighteenth centuries, simultaneously a Persian vernacular was developed in India and it was from here that the English officers of the East India company learnt Farsi before abolishing it as an official language of the Indian courts in 1837.

The experience of living 13 years abroad in four different countries (USA, Sweden, Poland & Italy), and having an intercultural marriage (with children) has certainly made me a bit less Brazilian than I planned. However, it has probably enlightened my multiple perception of my own Brazilian culture (if not complicated it!). My original curiosity drive to discover the world had slowly turned into a ‘chronic cultural shock syndrome’, when the excitement of being a newcomer was replaced by the constant search for the ‘cultureless’ universal essence of humans wherever. It was when I became an intercultural psychologist and coach. My first thought, when asked to describe ‘foreigners through Brazil eyes’, was to elaborate the answer based on the two most striking cultural differences between Brazilians and foreigners (specially from North America, North Europe & Australia): time orientation, and levels of communication.

Read more > Cultural Insights into Brazil