Intercultural Communication and Translation News

It’s rare that a $100 billion business can be marginalized, but such is the case with the international arm of Wal-Mart Stores (WMT). As a stand-alone company, it would rank among the top five global retailers. Inside the $401 billion retail giant, though, the business has traditionally received short shrift. Its Bentonville (Ark.) headquarters is underwhelming—a drab, largely windowless, one-story structure named after Bill Mitchell, a former Walmart executive whom nobody seems to remember.

Since venturing into Mexico in 1991, Walmart International has grown haphazardly. During the 1990s the retailer exported its big-box, low-price model. While that strategy worked in North America, the results were so bad in Germany and Korea that Walmart withdrew from those countries in 2006. In response, Michael T. Duke, the former international chief and current CEO, gave local managers more autonomy while instituting more stringent financial goals for each region.

The results are mixed: International sales rose 11.5% in the second quarter (before the impact of exchange rate fluctuations), while U.S. sales barely budged. But over the past few years, operating profit margins have declined on the international side, which now has 3,805 stores operating under 53 distinct banners in 15 markets. As international chief C. Douglas McMillon says, Walmart is “progressing from being a domestic company with an international division to being a global company.”

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Exactly a year after Nomura made its successful lunge for Lehman Brothers, the official line in Tokyo is that the merger is running like clockwork.

One or two oddments, though, are still getting lost in translation, despite the availability of native English speakers ready to take a glance over any important company circulars. A recent e-mail politely reminded staff in Nomura’s Tokyo headquarters that “gay colour nail polish and manicure” fell outside the company’s dress code.

The trading floor was also left baffled by guidelines on the correct type of trousers: “Wear the one gives to the ankle to the height of pants.”

Internally, everyone is convinced that the word “gay” was intended in its purely original sense of cheerful and bright. The problem is that many of the electronic Japanese-to-English dictionaries on sale in Japan are occasionally woefully behind the times on the more common usage of some English words. The Japanese compiler of the memo appears to have innocently typed the Japanese word hadena (gaudy) into one such machine and received the translation “gay”.

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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.

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Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called Translations, which took the time-consuming and costly task of translating the site and crowd-sourced it, asking the network’s millions of users to lend a hand.

The process proved to be very efficient: Facebook launched a Spanish site in Feburary 2008, only a few weeks after unveiling the app, and by June it had support for 16 more languages. It’s now up to over 60, including right-to-left reading languages like Hebrew. And now, Facebook is trying to patent the process that helped turn it into an international goliath.

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The Wall Street Journal has an article today suggesting Nomura is failing when it comes to females.

Specifically, the Journal says Nomura is guilty of the following faux pas:

1) Separating men and women during a training session for new hires.

2) Instructing the separated off women how to wear their hair, serve tea and choose wardrobes ‘according to the season.’

3) Telling some women to remove highlights from their hair, wear sleeves no shorter than mid-bicep and avoid brightly coloured clothing.

4) Changing some women’s email addresses to their married names from their maiden names.

A Lehman spokesperson in London informs us the information is ‘inaccurate’ and points to the presence of various senior women, including Bridget Anderson, COO of investment banking, and Saba Nazar, co-head of financial sponsors in Europe, as proof that it’s not as backward as all that.

However, senior headhunters and female bankers say the claims aren’t entirely unfeasible.

“In Lehman the individual is an individual. In Nomura it’s all about the firm and respect for elders. Nomura has been moving more and more towards the Western way of doing things but this highlights the extremes that might be left behind,” says the head of one Asian headhunting firm.

“The Japanese culture for women is very, very difficult,” confirms a senior Western banker who’s worked with Japanese clients. “It’s very archaic and women are expected to conform.”

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Having powered its way to the top in U.S. retailing, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has struggled to extend its dominance across the globe.

But the world’s largest retailer is learning in Brazil and elsewhere that the most successful ideas don’t necessarily flow from its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. That has it tailoring inventories and stores to local tastes — and exporting ideas and products pioneered outside the U.S.

Traffic-choked São Paulo, for instance, proved inhospitable to the kind of vast stores with which Wal-Mart dominates in American suburbs. At the same time, the local-market savvy of Brazilian retailers that Wal-Mart acquired has proved invaluable.

“What we have learned in the past couple of years is that one size does not fit all,” says Anthony Hucker, a British retail veteran now tasked with taking winning Wal-Mart store formats and expanding them globally.

Wal-Mart’s challenge abroad is to cater to local tastes for native products that are not popular elsewhere, while still making the most of the global purchasing might that lets its squeeze down its costs.

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A go-ahead ruralbased company from North Perrott is beating the recession by taking advantage of the current economic climate to open a network of offices around the world.

Translation and multilingual communication specialists, Kwintessential, has expanded its operations to Cape Town in South Africa, Buenos Aires in Argentina and Monterey in the USA with the appointment of English speaking managers for each country.

Offices in Turkey, India and Germany will follow later this year.

Earlier this year, Kwintessential was awarded accreditation in quality management for its high standards of systems management.

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In 1997, with $100 billion in annual sales and 750,000 employees in 8 countries including the U.S., Wal-Mart decided to open 85 stores in Germany, a move Wall Street analysts applauded because it would pave the way for expansion into all of Europe. The retailer bought up a couple of smaller German store chains, and sent over an executive who had successfully run 200 U.S. Wal-Mart stores from headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to manage the German operations. Nine years later, in July of 2006, Wal-Mart announced it would close down its German stores. The resulting loss: About $1 billion.

What went wrong?

Wal-Mart’s main mistake was blithely assuming that what worked in the U.S. would be just as effective in another country. First of all, that Bentonville executive in charge of Germany spoke no German, requiring all his direct reports to speak English at all times. (He turned out to be the German operations’ first of 4 CEOs in 4 years.) Worse, Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) exported its U.S. corporate culture wholesale — complete with a daily morning cheering session for store employees — and trained greeters and other staffers to ask customers “How are you today?” the way they do in U.S. stores.

Read more> Ask Annie

Related Links:

Intercultural Management Guide - free country specific tips and information.

Intercultural Management - an article about the role of today’s managers.

Management Coaching - one-to-one coaching for management.

Small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe are losing business due to a lack of “linguistic and intercultural skills” among their employees, EU Multilingualism Commissioner Leonard Orban told business representatives this week.

English ‘not business lingua franca’

“Sometimes people think that English is the lingua franca for business, but this is not true,” Commissioner Orban told participants in a roundtable discussion on the importance of language skills for SMEs, held as part of the EU’s SME Weekexternal .

“In terms of communication, English might be the lingua franca, but in addressing consumers everywhere in Europe and outside the EU, of course the company should […] develop linguistic and intercultural strategies,” Orban said.

The commissioner was addressing a roundtable which focused on “practical tools” to help small countries improve their work with languages. Discussions focused on possible shortcuts to better multilingual communication, reaching out to new customers abroad, and “making better strategic use of language skills”.

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The Swiss-based multinational food company, Nestle, has apologised to Azerbaijan after a gift attached to a breakfast cereal backfired.

The CD-ROM featured information about countries around the world but the data on Azerbaijan caused outrage there.

It said that Azerbaijan had started a war against neighbouring Armenia and that the hotly disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh belonged to Armenia.

Nestle has withdrawn the cereal and promised to seize the offending CDs.

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