Intercultural Communication and Translation News

The launch of the website for Our Languages, a groundbreaking initiative funded by the DCSF, takes place today at the third CILT Community Languages National Conference in Sheffield.

The new website, hosted by CILT, the National Centre for Languages, provides vital information and support for community languages teachers and managers in the UK. Content includes video clips showing best practice, case studies, useful links and training and event information. Key features include a database of schools teaching community languages in England and information on how to gain accreditation in community languages: www.ourlanguages.org.uk

The Our Languages project began in September 2007 in response to a need to raise the status of community languages in the curriculum and to recognise the work of the complementary (or supplementary) sector in England. The project aims to provide support for community languages teaching by developing partnerships between complementary and mainstream schools. In its first phase, which ran until March 2008, nine schools, teaching more than twelve community languages, formed regional partnerships in Birmingham, Leicester, London and Manchester.

Read more > CILT 

European IT services company Steria has launched the first of four international training and development programmes in India, designed to create a single culture across its global workforce.

Twelve of the 58 participants are from the UK, and all expect to gain leadership qualifications at the Steria Academy based in Chennai. The course will largely be conducted online over the next eight months.

Valerie Hughes-D’Aeth, Steria’s new group HR director, said the programme would help train senior managers to better deal with international clients.

“We have lots of international clients, so it’s essential we train our employees to deal with them,” Hughes-D’Aeth told Personnel Today. “Our HR teams will continue to deliver training locally, but these senior modules will be run across national boundaries.”

She said the benefit of the web-based programme was that it allowed the participants to work from their home countries, but receive the same training as their counterparts in the 15 other countries that Steria operates in. “I think this is quite unique to have a global programme like this that is a true blend of both face-to-face and multimedia,” she said.

Read more > Personnel Today 

Western managers are falling behind their Chinese counterparts in education and training, research has warned.

China has the fastest growing global economy and – according to a study by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) – also boasts a highly ambitious, sophisticated and commercially astute management population that poses a challenge to managers and businesses in the West.

The Global Management Challenge, which surveyed 327 managers in the UK, US, France and China, reveals that Chinese managers are underestimated by their Western counterparts and are launching a serious challenge to established Western business and management practices.

Read more > Chinese Managers 

Selling cars is a lot about cultural considerations. Ask the French. They are focussing on India’s cultural aspects to sell automobiles in the country. France’s top business and engineering schools have sent their students to India to learn the various aspects of working in the Indian cultural scenario. Renault, the French automobile manufacturer, is sponsoring the trip and guiding them are students from IIM-A.

Students from the top-notch HEC School of Management and Ecole Polytechnique are visiting Mumbai and Chennai to study the cultural diversity between India and France as part of a project funded by Renault under its chair in multicultural management set up a few weeks ago.

India and Japan are the first focus areas for the company because the two countries are “strategically important and yet complicated for being culturally different,” said professor Eolic Godelier, who is leading the team of students from Ecole Polytechnique. This company will also implement this other countries.

Read more >> Renault 

Local dishes like “Husband and wife’s lung slice” or “Chicken without sexual life” conjure lots of furrowed eyebrows on famished foreigners.

So, with the Olympics a few short weeks away, China is giving its cuisine a linguistic makeover.

It is proposing that restaurants change the names of exotic, but bizarrely named, delicacies to make them more delectable for the estimated 50,000 visitors arriving in August for the Summer Games.

The appetizer “Husband and wife’s lung slice” is taking on the more appetizing “Beef and ox tripe in chili sauce.”

“Chicken without sexual life” has been transformed into “Steamed pullet.”

The government has put down more than 2,000 proposed names in a 170-page book that it has offered to Beijing hotels, according to state media.

“Thanks to the pamphlet, we do not have to struggle to come up with the English translations of dishes any more, which is usually time consuming,” a senior manager at the four-star Guangzhou Hotel in downtown Beijing told the Xinhua news agency.

Read more >> China

As Nato-led forces try to establish security in Afghanistan, another lesser-known mission is happening – to make sense of the place names for English-speaking people.

As Nato and Afghan forces try to overcome the Taleban, with help from Afghan forces, western officials behind the scenes are also trying to standardise the names of every town and village.

At a conference in London, US and UK officials discussed how important it was that western translations of Arabic place names in the country should be consistent.

The process of transliteration – translating from one alphabet to another, such as Greek to Russian – has so far happened in a rather ad hoc way in Afghanistan and can leave the English-speaking armies and NGOs a little confused.

Although the well known cities and regions – such as Kabul, Kandahar and Helmand – have a clear and common translation in the western Roman alphabet, many Afghan villages have multiple spellings, even in their original forms, and many villages in different areas are called the same thing.

Read more >> Afghanistan

Cross-cultural competence (3C), another term for inter-cultural competence, has generated its own share of contradictory and confusing definitions, due to the wide variety of academic approaches and professional fields attempting to achieve it for their own ends. One author identified no fewer than eleven different terms with some equivalence to 3C: cultural savvy, astuteness, appreciation, literacy or fluency, adaptability, terrain, expertise, competency, awareness, intelligence, and understanding (Selmeski, 2007).

Organizations from fields as diverse as business, health care, government security and developmental aid agencies, academia, and non-governmental organizations have all sought to leverage 3C in one guise or another, often with poor results due to a lack of rigorous study of the phenomenon and reliance on “common sense” approaches based on the culture developing the 3C models in the first place (Selmeski, 2007).

The U.S. Army Research Institute, which is currently engaged in a study of the phenomenon, defines 3C as: “A set of cognitive, behavioral, and affective/motivational components that enable individuals to adapt effectively in intercultural environments” (Abbe et al., 2007). Cross-cultural competence does not operate in a vacuum, however. One theoretical construct posits that 3C, language proficiency, and regional knowledge are distinct skills that are inextricably linked, but to varying degrees depending on the context in which they are employed. In educational settings, Bloom’s affective and cognitive taxonomies (Bloom, 1956; Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1973) serve as an effective framework to describe the overlap area between the three disciplines: at the receiving and knowledge levels 3C can operate with near independence from language proficiency or regional knowledge, but as one approaches the internalizing and evaluation levels the required overlap area approaches totality.

Read more > Multi-National Multi-Cultural Collaboration 

The promotion of the benefits of diversity in the workplace can lead to positive economic and social advantages – that was the lead idea in the fourth Brussels Debate for the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008 held on the evening of 4 June 2008. It focused on the challenges and opportunities posed by an increasingly intercultural work environment. The participants agreed that today’s social reality in Europe, with its ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, represents a unique configuration in European history.

The debate took place in the Residence Palace in the framework of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, under the title «Couscous Culture: is that what Intercultural Dialogue in the workplace is all about?». It was organised by the European Commission in cooperation with the European Network Against Racism.

Read more >  Intercultural Dialogue

European cities offer the best quality of life for expatriate staff, according to a study of more than 200 locations.

The survey by Mercer, the international consultants, ranked the cities on the basis of personal safety, health and education facilities, transport, other public services, and social, economic, environmental and political factors.

The most attractive location for expatriate businesspeople was Zurich. The Swiss commercial centre, home of UBS, Swiss Re and Zurich financial services, scored 108 points under a ranking system that uses New York on 100 points as a base.

The US business centre, by comparison, was in 49th place, behind other US cities: Honolulu (28th), San Francisco (29th), Boston (37th) and Chicago and Washington?DC (equal 44th).Read more> Mercer 

Today, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, ThoughtFarmer announced the third generation of its wiki-inspired intranet platform: ThoughtFarmer Intranet 3.0 Multilingual.

ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social way for employees to collaborate, share ideas and find information. Wiki-inspired, but without the chaos, ThoughtFarmer combines the collaborative and empowering benefits of social software with a secure and centralized intranet platform demanded by the modern enterprise.

Previous versions of ThoughtFarmer addressed the need for organizations to be able to better leverage the intellectual capital that exists at all levels of the organization. ThoughtFarmer helped companies like Intrawest Placemaking break through regional and departmental barriers, bringing together geographically dispersed colleagues with similar job functions. Idea sharing on ThoughtFarmer produced real ROI.

In version 3.0, ThoughtFarmer sets its sights on breaking through the organizational language barrier.

“Our multinational customers want to collaborate regardless of language,” said ThoughtFarmer President, Darren Gibbons. “ThoughtFarmer 3.0′s features allow them to cross those language boundaries.”

Read more > Press Release