Intercultural Communication and Translation News

For a long time, Kraft Foods Inc., the second-largest international food company by revenue, struggled to make headway in Asia-Pacific, the world’s most populous region.

“The top line [revenue] was sluggish, profits were under squeeze. And critically, we didn’t have a strategic direction,” says Pradeep Pant, Kraft’s president for Asia-Pacific. “There was a lot of activity, a lot of churn, but not much impact.”

Kraft’s operating profit in Asia-Pacific between 2001 and 2007 was “slightly negative.” But starting in 2008, operating profit in the region has grown at a double-digit rate. The company doesn’t break out Asia-Pacific performance figures, but Kraft’s global net income in the second quarter jumped 11% to $827 million from $745 million in the year earlier period; sales fell 5.9% to $10.16 billion in the quarter.

The turnaround prescription in the region had several critical elements, including Kraft’s $7 billion acquisition of French company Groupe Danone’s global packaged baked-goods business in 2007. (Last week, Kraft’s latest major expansion effort, a $16.73 billion bid for Cadbury PLC of Britain, was rejected. Kraft said it would continue its quest, which would create a global food giant.) Another key “game changer” was that “we gave people close to the point of action the power to take decisions,” says Mr. Pant, who was ap

pointed to his role in January 2008. Also crucial was instilling a “mindset of risk-taking, people willing to experiment.”

That experimentation extended to altering product formulations to suit local tastes. For instance, when Kraft’s research showed that Chinese consumers found Oreo cookies too sweet, “we toned down the sugar, whereas the Indonesian version is definitely sweeter than the Chinese product.” As a result, he says, Oreo is now the best-selling packaged cookie in China.

Read more > Kraft

The patient in Room 328 had diabetes and hypertension. But when Va Meng Lee, a Hmong shaman, began the healing process by looping a coiled thread around the patient’s wrist, Mr. Lee’s chief concern was summoning the ailing man’s runaway soul.

“Doctors are good at disease,” Mr. Lee said as he encircled the patient, Chang Teng Thao, a widower from Laos, in an invisible “protective shield” traced in the air with his finger. “The soul is the shaman’s responsibility.”

At Mercy Medical Center in Merced, where roughly four patients a day are Hmong from northern Laos, healing includes more than IV drips, syringes and blood glucose monitors. Because many Hmong rely on their spiritual beliefs to get them through illnesses, the hospital’s new Hmong shaman policy, the country’s first, formally recognizes the cultural role of traditional healers like Mr. Lee, inviting them to perform nine approved ceremonies in the hospital, including “soul calling” and chanting in a soft voice.

The policy and a novel training program to introduce shamans to the principles of Western medicine are part of a national movement to consider patients’ cultural beliefs and values when deciding their medical treatment.

Read more > Mercy Medical Centre

Recent news from the Far East and Europe that several economies are moving out of recession seemed to come as something of a surprise to a number of economists. To date China, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Portugal, and Greece have all reported figures suggesting they’re on their way out of recession.

Yet our friends at Google are now sitting on probably the most accurate economic barometer of all. Google’s management can see on a daily or, at worst, monthly basis how the world’s major economies are doing. Even looking at the figures Google releases produces some fascinating insights.

Bearing in mind that Google isn’t first in some world economies that are emerging from the “downturn” with vigor, the company’s international sales figures, when compared with the U.S. and U.K. — as released by them — are striking.

Read more > SEM

A blockbuster sci-fi movie which caricatures Nigerians as gangsters and cannibals and a Sony PlayStation advert which implies they are fraudsters have infuriated a government battling to improve the country’s image.

South African film “District 9,” which has topped the UK box office for two straight weeks and ranked in the top 10 in North America, is an allegory on segregation and xenophobia, with alien life forms cooped up in a township set in Johannesburg.

None of the groups shown comes out particularly well, but the Nigerians are portrayed as gangsters, cannibals, pimps and prostitutes, while their leader’s name is pronounced Obasanjo — the same as that of Nigeria’s former president.

Nigeria has banned cinemas from showing it.

Read more > District 9

In order for the UK to boost international trade it must invest much more in languages, according to a new report.

The report by James Foreman-Peck of Cardiff Business School found that not learning languages “promotes complacency and under-investment”.

Teresa Tinsley, director of communications at CILT, the National Centre for Languages, said: “We urgently need to raise awareness amongst young people of both the economic and cultural benefits of learning a language.”

She went on to say that she wanted to see more employers using management skills and valuing languages as a key business skill.

Ms Tinsley said she wanted to see commitment from all government departments – not just the Department for Children, Schools and Families – to recognise the importance of languages to Britain’s future.

CILT recently published its new agenda for languages calling on government agencies and businesses to place more value on languages.

“We need to increase the number of UK graduates competent to work internationally, to enable them to compete with multilingual counterparts from across the world,” Ms Tinsley added.

The Cardiff Business School report also found evidence to suggest that Britain’s language investment is so low that it imposes a heavier tax on British trade than the average for the rest of the world.

News trickled out this month that Bing Translator had gained Thai support, meaning that users can translate to and from the language in IE8′s Accelerator, with the Microsoft Translator widget, with the Windows Live Messenger bot, with Microsoft Translator for Office, and with the Microsoft Translator API. All in all, it’s good news for anyone who knows the Thai language, though we should note that Google has supported it for some time.

This information prompted us to a do a quick quantitative comparison between the comparable translator services from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Here’s a summary of the three websites:

Google Translate – 51 languages
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish
Bing Translator – 20 languages
Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai
Yahoo Babel Fish – 13 languages
Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish

Regardless of the fact that Google has more languages, it’s important to remember to also compare quality. Assuming that your languages are supported by more than just one service, we recommend that you compare the two each and decide which one works better for you.

We should also note that while Microsoft and Google both allow any combination of two languages they support, Yahoo only allows translating between certain pairs of languages of the ones that it supports. The fact that Babel Fish is behind Bing Translator is not that surprising, even if Yahoo has a higher market share than Bing. Yahoo is hoping for the Microhoo deal to receive regulatory approval from the US and Europe, which will mean that Bing will be taking the reigns of all search from the two companies regardless. For this reason, Yahoo has likely let Babel Fish remain stagnant.

Read more > Google vs The Rest

The Canadian federal government is pumping another $7.7 million into French language services for the 2010 Winter Games following criticism that the Games may not be fully bilingual.

Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore made the surprise announcement during question period Tuesday.

It came after opposition MPs noted that Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser complained of “dismal” efforts to date by the Vancouver Organizing Committee and its government partners.

In a scrum later, Moore said the money will go toward translation and interpretation services as well as “permanent signage in and around all the Olympic sites in Vancouver as well as to medal ceremonies to ensure that they’re officially bilingual.”

Read more > Canada

At least £25 million was spent by forces across England and Wales last year to deal with foreign criminals or help victims and witnesses who cannot speak English.

It is enough to put 500 extra officers on the street for a year.

The figure is a rise of almost three quarters on spending since 2004 and is further evidence of the impact immigration has had on public services.

The increase has also come over the period since the EU expanded in to Eastern Europe which resulting in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers and their families heading to the UK.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister who obtained the figures, said: “This reveals one more hidden cost of the failure to control immigration numbers under this Government.

“Many public services have been put under pressure by the scale of immigration, and the police are no exception.

Read more > Telegraph

At Kwintessential we like to think big, to think new and to think in a way that benefits our website visitors. Over the past few weeks our Kwint-techies have been working away creating the latest addition to our suite of online tools and resources.

Let’s re-cap what we already offer to the world wide web for absolutely free:

> Country Etiquette Guides – great resource for anyone travelling to Athens or Azerbaijan on the local business culture.

> Articles - a range of unique and useful articles offering various  intercultural insights.

> Intercultural Business Communication - a popular tool for business people and students alike based on Hofstede’s research.

> Free Online Translation – use our software for gist translations.

> Website Translator – a widget for website owners allowing them the free instant translation of web pages.

> Language Identifier - can’t work out what language some text is? We can help.

For more of our tools and resources visit the Culture Vulture who will give you an intercultural tip for the day and show you around the things we offer.

We are now proud the announce the launch of Kwint-Vision. Essentially we are building a library of free online videos for our visitors. All the videos fall under the umbrella of our interest – cross cultural communication. We hope you will be pleased with the new resource. To visit simply click the logo below!

Free Online Intercultural Videos

As more or more people from different backgrounds, countries, cultures and religions immigrate to foreign lands, those countries become an intercultural melting pot. In order for the native people and the immigrant population to blend and create a thriving and successful atmosphere both sides need to develop some sort of intercultural tolerance and understanding of the differences that may exist between them. An example of poor intercultural understanding, or one based simply on stereotypes, is offered by the town of Herouxville in Quebec, Canada.

A declaration issued by the town in January 2007, which was designed to inform immigrants, “that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here [i.e. Herouxville]“. It then went on to state that the immigrant population would therefore have to refrain from their cultural norms and activities such as to “kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them, etc.”

Read more > Global Utah Weekly