11/16/2005 - 11/17/2005

u.s. navy opens cultural awareness training centre

The need for intercultural awareness training is becoming more and more relevant in the modern world. One manifestation of this has been in the armed forces of many nations. The U.S. in particular has now noted that cultural awareness is indeed a crucial tactic in their "war on terror". Marines are now undergoing cultural awareness training to help them deal with local populations.

Recently an education centre, the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL), was opened by the U.S. navy to help make Marines familiar with the language, customs and mores of the populations they are likely to encounter. In terms of battlefield prowess, senior Marines consider this step at least as important as the development of new hardware. Lt. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said, “Our Marines must be comfortable operating in austere, very complex environments including those where firepower is not the primary means to victory, or may even be counterproductive.�

Marines steeped in the lessons learned from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts agree that cultural awareness is an important asset in the kinds of wars being fought in the post-Soviet era.

etiquette training for indian business women

An expatriate relocation and cross-cultural services company, will be holding seminars as a part of its Global Indian course, in Chennai and Bangalore. The first, titled `Business Entertaining for the Global Indian Woman', will be held on December 1. Some of the highlights of the seminar will include `becoming the perfect hostess', `entertaining skills for every occasion', and `making an event of the event'.

china to tidy up signs

English-speaking visitors to Beijing have long enjoyed the city's entertainingly erratic bilingual signs. Who could resist messages in the Forbidden City that tell tourists: "Don't Fall Down", or the enigmatic emergency advice to "Being Urgent Call 110 Quickly"?

Such delights could be under threat, however, as the municipal government steps up efforts to avoid errors and improve consistency by issuing new standards for bilingual signs used on its transport network or at tourist and cultural sites.

avon & somerset police in recruitment drive for interpreters

Avon and Somerset Police are looking for more interpreters who can assist officers and during interviews. The force are particularly looking for interpreters with good English as well as written and oral fluency in Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Farsi, French, German, Kurdish, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Somali, Spanish and Turkish.

mayor pushes for more diversity in london cabs

The Mayor of London has launched a series of roadshows to encourage people from ethnic communities to consider becoming licensed taxi drivers.

Only one in 20 existing taxi drivers is from black, Asian and ethnic minorities, compared to nearly a third of London's population. Only 1% of current drivers are Asian and 2.4% are black. Mayor Ken Livingstone said: "More people from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds are applying to become cab drivers, but at the current rate it will be 30 years before the trade is representative of London's communities.

english losing control of the web

Had the Internet been invented in China, you'd need some fluency in Chinese to type Web addresses. But as a U.S. invention, the Internet is in English.People around the world are losing patience with that. They already have keyboards, software and Web sites in their own languages.

Now they want Internet domain names, but the Internet's key oversight agency allows that only in limited circumstances. And that's one of the reasons countries led by Pakistan, India and China have been pressuring the United States to cede control of the Internet's addressing system at the UN World Summit on the Information Society, which opens today in Tunisia.

Korean grammar book for foreigners published

The National Institute of Korean Language has published a book on the Korean language grammar for foreigners after six years of preparation. "The Korean Language Grammar for Foreigners" is composed of two parts – one for grammar drills and the other for useage practice. The institute plans to translate the book into English, Thai and Vietnamese.

1st basque speech at european institution

Basque, Catalonian, Galician and Valencian languages, all of them official in the Spanish State, will be used for the first time in an official speech in a European institution, specifically in the Committee of the Regions beginning today in Brussels.

The Commissioner for External Relations for the President of the Basque Government Jose Maria Muñoa will have the honor of making the fists official speech in Basque language in the history of the European Union. "It will be the first time and I admit it really thrills me to be the first to address a European institution in Basque language", Muñoa said.

multilingual Workplaces commonplace

In the USA safety professionals report that more and more languages are being spoken in their workplaces and that worksites where only one language is spoken are now a distinct minority. The survey from Safety.BLR.com highlights the difficulty that today's safety managers have in training their multicultural workforces.

The Business & Legal Reports survey asked: "How many languages are spoken among your company's employees?" Fully 3 of every 4 of the 493 respondents reported that at least two languages were spoken at their facility. Thirty-eight percent of respondents reported 3 to 6 languages, 28 percent reported 2 languages, 6 percent reported 7 to 10, and 4 percent reported more than 10. Only 24 percent reported that theirs was a one-language workforce.

nasa gets russian translation machine

Russian PROMT Company completed an agreement with NASA about the use of its system machine translation by the International Space Station. The leader of the machine translation industry announced that PROMT translation engine was sent to the orbit with NASA astronauts.

Recent research results demonstrated that astronauts often have to deal with multilingual translation, because NASA tightly cooperates with international programs, especially the Russian Federal Space Agency and astronauts, so a necessity of special software to provide Russian-English and English-Russian translations was pronounced.

calls for simultaneous interpreting in new zealand parliament

In New Zealand The Maori Party is calling on Parliament to install a simultaneous interpreting service in the debating chamber.

At present, an interpreter is available to translate speeches and questions spoken in Maori into English. But the Maori Party has put a case to the Speaker to undertake a feasibility study for an interpreting service through headphones.

multilingual websites for ethnic minority populations

Multilingual websites are not only becoming important as a tool for communication internationally, but increasingly are being used nationally in order to appeal to ethnic minorities. A recent example is that of Somerset County Council who have now translayed their front page into Portuguese, Spanish, Malayalam, Tagalog, Arabic, Mandarin, Bengali, Polish and Turkish.

word of the day: prestidigitation

prestidigitation \pres-tuh-dij-uh-TAY-shuhn\, noun:
Skill in or performance of tricks; sleight of hand.

He was the man who had sat alone in a room for hundreds and hundreds of hours, his fingers manipulating cards and coins until he had learned and could perfectly reproduce every form of prestidigitation found in books of magic lore. -- Brian Moore, The Magician's Wife

Some modern readers may be less surprised to find that efforts to use accounting prestidigitation to deflect borrowing away from current expenditure speedily came unstuck and that a return to more conventional ideas of financial integrity was rewarded by what seems to be a generation of calm, not entirely due to gaps in the record. --Peter Rycraft, "Fiscalitat i deute public en dues viles del camp de Tarragona: Reus i Valls, segles," English Historical Review, November 2002