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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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:
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!
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.”
Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.
Joshua Arjuna Stephens, a 2007 graduate of Wesleyan University, works in Beijing for XPD Media, which makes online games.
Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.
“I’ve seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years,” said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China.
“When I came over to China in 1994, that was the first wave of Americans coming to China,” he said. “These young people are part of this big second wave.”
“The only thing we deliver or are trying to deliver to our guests is satisfaction . . . we have nothing else…In our business, no excuse is accepted when something goes wrong…”
Koichi Satoh
President and General Manager, Hotel Okura
One of the common complaints I hear from Japanese folks about American customer service is that when Americans break a promise, rather than apologizing they make excuses. This is more a gap in cultural expectations than an indictment of American manners. And it begs some questions:
Why are Americans so uncomfortable apologizing?
Why is it that when confronted with criticism, many Americans tend to get defensive?
And why would the Japanese be any different?
American behavior is driven to a large degree by how Americans define the concept of responsibility within the context of a society that values individualism. So back to the first two questions: why are Americans uncomfortable apologizing and why so defensive? The answer is that the mere act of apologizing in America is often interpreted as an admission of personal (read “individual”) guilt. After all, someone’s got to accept responsibility. No surprise that no one wants to step forward and assume the burden of responsibility as it can wreak havoc on one’s reputation or career. For this reason, when Americans give “reasons” for making a mistake they are, more often than not, on the defensive–victims of circumstance outside of their control. No one told me about the schedule change! And so on.
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