Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Tourism can play a key role in advancing understanding among cultures, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today.

“In a global environment marked by rising intolerance and cross-cultural tensions, often exacerbated by the economic divide between nations, tourism can foster spiritual and cultural respect among and between peoples, while creating economic opportunities to benefit disadvantaged populations,” he said in a message to the International Conference on Tourism, Religions and the Dialogue of Cultures.

The three-day Conference, which is taking place in Cordoba, Spain, has been convened by the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), which became the world body’s newest specialized agency in 2003.Read more> Conference 

If you travel, particularly to places off the tourist trail, a sense of cultural disorientation will often overtake you. You’ll find yourself in situations where the rules are totally different and making a string of faux pas is all too easy. At a barbecue in rural Australia, I remember thinking I was doing fine, standing at one end of the garden bantering with the women. It was only when the shouts of, “Hey, are you trying to chat up my missus?!” were repeated several times that I began to understand that Down Under, in the sticks at least, you talk to the fellers.

In the West of Ireland one Boxing Day, I expressed a rather shocked surprise at the enthusiasm with which the old guys at the bar were awaiting the arrival of the “rent boys”. It was only when a bunch of young men dressed up as birds turned up that I found out about the fine old Irish tradition of the Wren Boys.

Read more> The Independent 

AOL today announced the next steps in its ambitious global expansion effort with the launch of new local language versions of the AOL India portal, http://www.aol.in, and the launch of Truveo’s popular video search engine serving eight countries, including India.

“India is a very important market for AOL, and these announcements show our commitment to serving online consumers here with a robust portal and industry leading video search tools,” said Ron Grant, President and COO of AOL. “These are also important steps in our ongoing efforts to make AOL a truly global company. We started this year with three international portals in Europe, and we will end 2008 with a presence in 30 countries around the world.”

AOL.in is launching content channels in the Hindi and Tamil languages, improving the breadth of AOL’s offerings at a time when the online audience in India is skyrocketing. The number of Internet users in urban India has grown by 28% in the past year, and about 60% of all active online Indians (30 million) prefer to read in local Indian languages.* The Hindi and Tamil language portals will have language sections in News, Cinema and Astrology.Read more> AOL 

Arpan Sharma has an extraordinary linguistic talent. He can speak in 11 different tongues and is only 10 years old.

Aside from English, Arpan speaks Hindi, which he picked up from his teacher parents, and, at school, he learnt Italian when he was seven, German at the age of eight, Spanish at nine, and French last term.

He also speaks Thai, Swahili, Polish, Chinese Mandarin and is currently studying the difficult Lugandan language of Uganda. Staff at the 560-pupil, fee-paying Blue Coat’s School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, described his talents as “extraordinary”.Read more> Arpan 

MySpace, the popular social networking site has announced plans to roll out a Russian language version to capitalise on the country’s fast-growing Internet advertising business.

Alexa currently ranks MySpace in 55th place in Russia but analysts say their competitive advantage lies in coming to a market with mainly weak players. According to Konstantine Belov, media analyst at UralSib, another factor in their favour would be their established brand and well-honed technology. Russia’s social networking market is currently dominated by Yandex owned, MoiKrug (”My Circle”) and Vkontakte.ru.

Vitaly Kupeyev, an analyst at AlfaBank, said that although the online advertising market being targetted by MySpace was a fast growing segment, it still only makes up 2% of the market. “A lot depends on MySpace’s marketing strategies”, Kupeyev said. “The projection for Internet advertising for 2012 is a mere 5% of the total ad market”,

Read more> My Space 

Communities secretary Hazel Blears has urged human resources professionals to get out more to attract more black and minority ethnic (BME) workers.

Speaking exclusively to Personneltoday.com, Blears said the role for HR in attracting more BME people into work was to go to the places where different communities live, and encourage them to apply for positions.

Currently, the ethnic minority share of the working age population stands at 9.3% or 3.26 million people, according to 2004 Department for Work and Pensions figures. The latest Office for National Statistic figures (2002-03) state that the employment rate for white people working in the UK is 75.5%, compared to just 57.3% for non-white groups.

Read more> Hazel Blears 

The word “yes” is spoken. Heads nod. You think you’re about to ink the deal, then silence. It turns out that “yes” really meant, “We hear you,” not, “We agree.” The problem could be a clash of cultures, whether you’re working with a prospective client or supplier or, as Japanese giant Sony learned, even your own subsidiary.

A few years ago, Sony experienced a silent revolution that delayed a major IT project for two years because the Miami-based Japanese project leaders working on the project for Latin America “didn’t understand why employees would not do what they were told to do,” recalls Cesar Aguirre, then a senior Sony HR executive. The project’s Latin American constituents said they weren’t consulted and felt rebuffed when they offered suggestions.

Read more > Entrepreneur 

Tide, a product of Proctor and Gamble (P & G), is a well-known laundry product. In India, Tide and Ariel (both P & G products) control 11% of the domestic detergent market (P & G, 2004). In March of 2004, P & G launched a campaign to gain more control in India by reducing the price of detergent by 20-50% resulting in a 200-gram pack of Tide selling for about $0.22 (P & G, 2004). An increase in the market share is likely to result in an increased number of Indian users logging on to the Tide website. Tide.com features a stain detective to provide users with advice on removing stains while doing laundry. The Tide.com stain detective was developed based on a card sorting activity in which clusters “mapped to rooms in a house where the stain would occur” (Nelson & Hibner, 2003, p. 1323). As a result of this, the stain detective uses the metaphor of a prototypical American house to facilitate users’ search for a particular stain type.

Read more > Tide 

Let’s begin with a joke.The United Nations sent out a worldwide survey. The request: Please give your honest opinion about possible solutions to end the food shortage in the rest of the world.

That survey has been a disaster.

In Africa, nobody understood the meaning of food.

In Eastern Europe, nobody understood the meaning of honest.

In Western Europe, nobody understood the meaning of shortage.

In China, nobody understood the meaning of give your opinion.

In the Middle East, nobody understood the meaning of solution.

And in the United States, nobody understood the rest of the world.

The joke presents a number of intercultural stereotypes and dangerous preconceived ideas… But where there’s smoke there’s fire.

A recent bitter clash between French giant Danone (which makes Evian bottled water, among other products) and its Chinese Joint-Venture partner showed once again that even world-leading companies underestimate the importance of studying foreign cultures before implementing business development plans abroad. As the imaging industry continues to expand globally, intercultural relations will be a key to smooth relations. The American machine vision market, for example, is expected to grow by 17 percent this year, Europe by 3 percent and the rest of the world and Asia by 14 percent. The global machine vision market was $8.1 billion in 2006 and expected to grow to more than $15 billion by 2012.

Read more > Doing Business Abroad

Just getting set up in your new French office? Nerve-wracking, isn’t it? Here are some tips from Expatica’s Culture Coach Nathalie Kleinschmit to make sure you get off to a good start and read the signals correctly in your new environment.

Let’s see if you recognise yourself in Jason’s tale of his stay at his multinational company’s head office in Paris:

“When I got to the front desk, they told me I had to wait because they hadn’t received my badge yet. Twenty minutes went by before my manager arrived to authorize my entrance. He then walked me to my new office and and told me that a meeting was scheduled with the team at 3pm that afternoon and that, until then, I could read through the files.

I had my own laptop but couldn’t get the Internet connection to work. For the next few hours, I could see people walking by peering into my office but not a single person came in to introduce themselves to me. I went to get a coffee and discovered that the machine wasn’t coin-operated and that I needed a card. For lunch, I had already eaten in the cafeteria on previous trips and had a voucher so I was able to get a platter together. But I remember feeling quite alone and wondering if I was ever going to fit in.

Read more > Expatica