Launch of ‘Welcoming the World’ - an initiative to help Londoners give great customer service to international visitors
London is already attracting millions of visitors every year and with the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games on the horizon, many more will come to our city. Regional Language Network London’s initiative ‘Welcoming the World’, which is funded by the London Development Agency, is helping people and businesses from across London to understand the expectations of these international visitors from a customer service point of view, and to find out a little about different countries and languages. A range of events, country profiles and a guide to dealing with visitors will help London businesses and Londoners go that extra mile.
Events
Our first one-day workshops are taking place on 7 May (Stratford) and 22 May (City Lit, Holborn) with further dates soon to be announced. Participation is free of charge for London residents. Find out more.
Guide to giving great customer service
Our downloadable guide gives tips and advice on dealing with people from different cultures – helping you to understand your own cultural view as well as other people’s. Find out more.
Country profiles
We’ve created profiles which give cultural advice on 11 different countries and territories – including China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Middle East, Poland, Russia, Spain and the USA. Find out more.
BNY Mellon Asset Servicing, the global leader in securities servicing, has launched a new innovative multilingual reporting solution for institutional clients, beginning with simplified Chinese. Over 2008, the company will add ten more languages including Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and Korean to facilitate expanded use by its growing multilingual international user base.
This latest enhancement to BNY Mellon’s reporting capabilities will allow clients the convenience of being able to translate their reports into the local language of their choice. When clients choose to import data files such as excel; column headings will be provided in the selected local language enabling the creation of local language reports. Multilingual formats supported will include web drill-down, PDF, Excel, XML, CSV, TSV, and text. Previously all information was only available in English.
ENLASO Corporation, a provider of documentation, Web site, and software translation and localization solutions, today announced that it has authored a new best practices white paper titled “Preparing Projects for Localized Desktop Publishing.”
This complimentary white paper summarizes useful guidelines for the development of documentation that is ready for localization and translation for foreign markets as well as solutions to various multilingual publishing challenges. The document also includes a thorough checklist, with practical examples, that covers the decisions that should be made and the information that should be provided to the localization vendor before starting a publishing-oriented translation and localization project.
London, UK, 4th March 2008: Foreigners should be made to learn a country’s language before being allowed to work there. This is the sentiment recorded by over 400 respondents to an online survey. The results portray a growing feeling that immigrants are not assimilating well into adopted countries and that immigration laws should be tightened to ensure those offered work are able to effectively integrate within their host country.
As a result of globalization, people are emigrating to foreign countries in seek of opportunities. Until recently, the increased workforce has been welcomed, allowing economies to grow by filling jobs and boosting spending. However, the last few years have started to show the first signs of cracks. Debates rage across Europe and North America on the issues of immigration, multiculturalism and the need to protect indigenous cultures against a perceived influx of ‘foreign invaders’.
One area of particular concern has been the issue of immigrants entering countries for work without knowledge of the language. A discourse at lay-level, now raised in political circles, espouses the idea that immigrants with no knowledge of the language are not able to assimilate into the culture or society. The resultant problems include the creation of ghettos by immigrants, a perceived lack of contribution to communities and an increased strain on public funds and resources across services; such as health care, legal, translation and interpreting. At a political level this has manifest in a number of ways. In December 2007, the British government announced that husbands and wives of work visa applicants will have to prove their English language skills before being allowed entry. In Japan the government is tightening its long-term visa conditions by requiring applicants to pass a language test. Nowhere has the impact of immigration on language been seen more clearly than in the USA. The debate over whether or not English should be deemed the official language stems from America’s concern that immigrants must learn English.
Results of an online survey released today suggest the mood is not changing. Held by Kwintessential Ltd, a cross-cultural communications consultancy, the online survey attracted over 400 votes. 62% of respondents agreed that “Foreigners must learn the language before being allowed to work in my country.” The votes were taken from visitors to the company’s website site, the ten most registered nationalities (in order of votes) being United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, Norway and Sweden.
“It is interesting to see the politicization of language and culture at the moment in the immigration debate. The sentiment is no longer about jobs and a strain on resources, such as benefits. It has moved to a whole new level where people seem genuinely concerned about the impact immigrants are having on native cultures and specifically their inability to engage with and adapt to it,” states Kwintessential’s Managing Director Neil Payne. “Now the political classes have latched on to this it will be fascinating to see what policies they adopt in order to counter it.”
Founded in 2003, Kwintessential is one of the world’s premier providers of cultural awareness training and cross-cultural services such as translation, interpreting and multilingual website design. The company is dedicated to helping individuals, organisations and businesses understand the implications of working in an interconnected world economy. The survey is one of many run on the website to tap into current feelings about cultural issues resulting from globalization.
A breakfast seminar on ‘cultural intelligence’ showing how organisations can improve cross-cultural communication and harness the diversity of their employees, will be held in London on 29 April 2008.
Called Cultural Intelligence: Making cultural difference an advantage, not a problem, the seminar has been organised by drama-based learning specialist Steps Drama.
Aimed at managers and HR practitioners in multinational organisations, it will combine presentations, advice and live action drama sequences to introduce the concept of ‘cultural intelligence’ and to show how it can be applied to improve cultural perception and to resolve cross-cultural friction points.
Amanda Leacy, a Global HR Director at Accenture, responsible for IT Delivery Centres in 15 worldwide locations, will explain how cultural intelligence is integral to success when running a global network of teams.
To bring the learning points to life, professional actors from Steps will present short scenarios showing cross-cultural team members in a fictional organisation - with different expectations, attitudes and assumptions - trying to use and apply the concepts.
Mobile World Congress 2008 –Enterpret Communications, Inc. today announced the launch of the Enterpreter(TM) Mobile Translator — with the largest mobile English-Spanish translation database — now available for the Americas and
European markets.
Consumers seeking instant translation services now have direct access to Enterpret’s robust mobile translator, specifically designed for Internet enabled mobile phones. Offering web 2.0 mobile technology, Enterpreter(TM) provides travelers, business people and consumers needing language translation the ability to translate words, commonly used phrases or
conversational sentences directly from their mobile phones.
Welocalize, Inc., a leading provider of integrated globalization services, announced today the acquisition of Sinometrics, a multilingual software localization firm based in Seattle. The acquisition (number eight for Welocalize) signifies another major stepping stone in building a great company with first-class talent and customers.
As the largest Seattle-based localization company, Sinometrics has corned the Seattle market by providing language solutions to technology companies using a value-based service model and a solid technology platform. Their venerable presence and down-the-hall attitude has won Sinometrics significant business from Microsoft and a place as preferred localization service provider for Cisco. “We were immediately impressed by their fresh and forthright approach, and are delighted to join forces in servicing two key customers in the Seattle region,” explains Smith Yewell, CEO of Welocalize.
The localisation company, Translate.org.za, have launched a year long project called Decathlon to translate ten computer programs into various international languages.
The company recently received generous funding from the international grantmaking foundation, the Open Society Institute to help volunteers in those countries help make computer programs available in their own languages.
During the project, which is named the Decathlon project, volunteer translators from all over the world will be assisted to translate ten computer applications into their own languages. The Decathlon
project is a continuation of Translate.org.za’s efforts to promote the creation of translation communities by volunteer native speakers in all countries.
According to Samuel Murray, the Decathlon project leader, many world languages face an uphill struggle in countries where computer programs are in English despite the fact that few people speak English fluently. People who are passionate about their own languages do not always have the technical expertise to help make more software available in their languages, he says.
The Decathlon project was designed to bridge the gap between volunteer translators and developers of opensource software. The project makes use of a web-based translation tool, Pootle, which was created by Translate.org.za specifically to help volunteers do translation without requiring any programming expertise.
BMC Group, Inc., a leading provider of information management support services for the legal, financial, corporate and medical industries, today announced the introduction of its internationalized multi-language VDR capability. This represents an important user experience enhancement and addition to BMC Group’s VDR offering. The first phase of this release will allow clients to now have their virtual data room configured in Japanese and Cyrillic in addition to English. With the rise of cross border transactions and growing number of multi-national clients and users, BMC Group has responded by providing an internationalized VDR platform and has led with the Japanese language interface, launched in December 2007. The internationalized capability allows the users and clients to easily administer and manage their preferred language, add/edit languages or countries, and receive alerts and emails in their preferred language.
“These enhancements to our technology have been made in response to increasing demands internationally and specifically in Japan and Russia for a local language platform which can offer file names and indexing in that language and full text search within the data room. Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the EU following the accession of Bulgaria in January, 2007. So, in addition to Russia, we see many opportunities with the growth of many of the other former Soviet Union countries such as Ukraine and Belarus,” said Sean Allen, CEO of BMC Group Inc.
“The Japanese language VDR has proved to be a great success with our clients. We expect significant growth in Japan using this internationalized platform and we will also introduce a Chinese language version early in 2008,” Allen added.
Were you aware that British Sign Language is the second most widely used language in the UK? Despite this however, British Sign Language still fails to have the same legal recognition afforded to those using other indigenous UK languages, such as Scottish Gaelic and Welsh.
Deaf members of our community face such discrimination on a daily basis and are often precluded from participating in society as fully contributing members. Take for example, the recent well publicised case of Mr McWhinney who was told that he could not serve on a jury due to his need to have a sign language interpreter present for deliberations.
The desire to help further improve services for the Deaf Community and to help publicise the cause makes Kwintessential extremely happy to be able to launch their new British Sign Language Interpreter Service.
In addition to providing interpreting services for the majority of world spoken languages, Kwintessential now seek to address the interpreting needs of those within the community who require sign language interpreting services.
“We have regular requests from clients for the provision of British Sign Language interpreters and we are now seeking to bridge that gap. Focusing on fully qualified sign language interpreters only, we have built an excellent team of individuals who will be engaged for assignments. As with our spoken language interpreting services, we will invest all our efforts into ensuring that an excellent level of service and professionalism is provided and delivered. We will also help promote the campaign to have BSL recognised as a legal language,” explains Nikki Johnson, who will be overseeing the service.
The British Sign Language Interpreting service forms a significant part of our strategy in gaining recognition as the UK leader in setting and delivering excellence in the provision of language services.
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