Intercultural Communication and Translation News

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.”

Read more > Nomura

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.

Read more > Wal-Mart

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.

Read more > Kwintessential

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”.

Read more > Business

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.

Read more > Nestle

Millions of migrant workers may be out of a job and China’s once booming economy may be locked in a downward spiral as the global economic crisis bites, but for a particular Chinese brand of humor it’s been a boon.

Many of the jokes have been circulating online, or via text message in a country whose population is obsessed with their mobile phones.

A bank worker calls a colleague, goes one joke on the tiexue.net bulletin board.

“Hey, how’s it been going?”

“Not so bad.”

“Oh, sorry, I’ve definitely called the wrong number.”

Others adopt a similar tone, but riffing off Communist propaganda slogans.

“In the face of the financial crisis, I have bravely stood up and am marching forward! That’s because … I can’t pay back my loans and the bank has repossessed my car.”

Internet use has exploded in recent years, but the government keeps a close tab on what appears, removing offensive comments or detaining those who criticize too much on certain sensitive topics, such as human rights.

This hasn’t stopped people taking to the Internet to laugh about the crisis, or crack witticisms.

Read more > Yahoo!

News in that For Chrysler has created an alliance with Fiat.  The American car maker is under pressure by the U.S. government to restructure in order to save the company and jobs in the wake of the credit crunch. An alliance with Fiat holds the promise of more attractive small, fuel-efficient cars for Chrysler down the road as well as better access to important global markets. Up to now, Chrysler hasn’t been competitive in either area.

On Tuesday, the companies announced the basic terms of a tentative “global strategic alliance”: Fiat, Italy’s largest automaker, will provide no cash of its own to the struggling American automaker. Instead, in exchange for a 35% equity stake, Fiat will provide Chrysler with “technology,” including the engineering underlying some of Fiat’s small cars, which have proven popular in Europe.

“They’ve got some beautiful stuff over there,” said Magliano, “and a lot of these things can be sold in the U.S.”

Unlike Chrysler, Fiat is known to specialize in small, fuel-efficient cars that are popular in Europe. But the sort of “platform sharing” envisioned for Chrysler and Fiat takes years to bear fruit, so don’t expect to see a Dodge version of the Fiat Punto at your Chrysler dealer anytime soon, said Magliano.

“It’s difficult to have cross-cultural alliances like this,” Magliano said, adding that language and cultural differences, as much as anything else, can hamper progress.

Read more > Fiat-Chrysler

As the credit crunch continues to bite with vengeance, business across the globe are assessing how to use 2009 in order to be prepared for a possible up-turn in 2010. For many the answer will lie in working more internationally. However, a survey released today shows that businesses not only need to pay attention to costs, business processes and the like but also to the cultural awareness of their personnel.
Most analysts and business leaders acknowledge that 2009 will be a difficult year. With the flow of credit at an all time low and government policies needing months in order to take any affect, people and businesses are gearing up for a rocky year. However, businesses worldwide are approaching the downturn with a strategic response and analysing how to consolidate market positions in order to take advantage of the awaited up-turn. One strategy being implemented is to look abroad.
Looking beyond national borders offers many advantages in terms of reducing costs, finding new revenue streams and increasing market coverage. However, although going global seems an attractive proposition businesses must be aware of potential pitfalls. Apart from red-tape, local business conditions and the complexities of setting up operations, cultural awareness is critical for personnel working in foreign countries.
A survey released to today by the cross-cultural communications consultancy Kwintessential reveals at a whopping 88% of their internationally-savvy respondents agreed that cultural awareness training would have been of benefit to them prior to doing business in a foreign country. The results clearly demonstrate that businesses and their decision makers are not considering the impact sending their personnel into different cultural climates can have on the success of their operations. It could be assumed that a “we all do business the same” mentality guides such decisions.
The survey asked visitors to the Kwintessential website: “If you have worked abroad before, do you think cultural training would have helped you?” The question was posed in a manner that would only elicit responses from people who had actually been abroad for work in the past, and now using hindsight understood whether or not cultural differences had an impact on their trip.
Cultural awareness (or intercultural) training at a personal level is about helping people understand how their own values, assumptions, perceptions and ways of working can be challenged when working in another culture. Cultures differ in many ways whether it is in communication styles, how trust is built, how meetings are conducted and how people are motivated. By helping people understand themselves better as well as appreciating the culture(s) they are about to work in/with the result is greater synergy, better success rates and stronger relationships.
Cultural awareness training is a simple, cost effective and long term solution and something businesses should invest in for 2009. As part of a properly prepared international business strategy the provision of such training to staff can reap excellent rewards.
“Now is the time to invest in a business and invest in its people. Looking internationally is vital now and we all need to make sure that cultural awareness is at the top of our list as this is what can really give you a competitive advantage as well as improve chances of success,” commented Neil Payne, the company’s Director.

In a recent Accenture study, cultural issues were listed as one of the main reasons for problems in offshore outsourcing deals and over half of National Outsourcing Association (NOA) members surveyed recently also said cultural differences are still an issue in offshore outsourcing deals.

Two factors that are rarely present in any domestic projects, but cannot be avoided when going offshore, are geographical distance and cultural differences.

Geographical distance might be a factor in terms of unfavorable time zone differences but today most of the offshore service providers ensure that their business hours are adjusted to ensure that you have several hours of overlap per day in common.

However the impact of cultural difference is something that should not be ignored when going offshore. Depending on the location you are offshore outsourcing to, cultural differences can vary from minor if you nearshore, for instance in Ireland or Eastern Europe to a real cultural clash if you offshore to low cost countries in Asia such as India or China.

Read more > Offshoring