Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Imagine this: You walk into your local Wal-Mart and see a pool filled with live turtles, cages of live chickens, and an aquarium with live fish. Are you in the pet department? No, you’re in the grocery section – these animals are for your dinner!

In Western culture, this would be shocking. You might even see protests, or consumer outrage. But in Eastern cultures, this is typical. Why? Wal-Mart conducted market research before expanding into China, and discovered that people in these cultures don’t like food wrapped in plastic. It gives them the impression that the food is old, and they won’t buy it.

So, Wal-Mart’s solution for the East was the complete opposite of what they do in the West. They decided to sell live animals. As a result, the company has been very successful in Eastern markets.

Read more >> Mind Tools 

The Fiji Hotel Workers Union is urging overseas investors and expatriates managing hotels and resorts in Fiji to understand and respect the Cultures of the Fijian workers of this country.

Union General Secretary Daniel Urai says some of the bad remarks that are common in hotels by expatriate management should be stopped.

Urai says this was one of the reasons why some of his members had gone on a protest recently against the management of the RADDISONS RESORT at Denarau in Nadi.

“We have expatriate management who make counter-sending remarks to workers and we have addressed this in some other properties and some expatriates have been reviewed the way or they manage locals in the way they utter statement and words, to them and hopefully this will now change in the future.”

The dispute was finally settled by the union and the Resort management.Read more >> Fiji 

SDL (LSE: SDL), the leading provider of Global Information Management (GIM:  8.75, -0.02, -0.22%) solutions, announced today the launch of a worldwide language service provider (LSP) partner program. Modeled after the successful Idiom LSP Advantage Program, the SDL LSP partner program is designed to work closely with LSP partners who leverage SDL GIM technology to increase the value they provide their customers seeking cost-effective delivery of timely, relevant global content into local markets.

“Typically more than 90 percent of an international company’s source content has a global audience, yet due to the massive complexity of managing dynamic global content only 10 percent is actually translated,” said Mark Lancaster, CEO of SDL. “One of our main corporate goals at SDL is to provide joined up technology solutions across the translation supply chain. This means not only focusing on translation management systems, but also to enhance the value of our solutions, terminology management and desktop translation editors to provide more value to LSPs and translators. We aim to provide integrated solutions that offer seamless connectivity throughout the extended translation supply chain.”

Read more >> SDL 

Baidu.com, the largest Chinese Internet search service provider in China and even the world, officially rolled out on July 10 its online translation service to compete head-to-head with the well-received similar service that was launched by Google.

From Internet search to online advertising, now the two search giants once again are in direct competition in the online translation service sector.

The online translation service of the Chinese search service provider offers Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translation and English dictionary. The service supports translation of 1,000 Chinese characters at most.

Read more >> Baidu 

It was a lofty idea: Formulate a British “statement of values” defining what it means to be British, much like the Declaration of Independence sets out the ideals that help explain what it means to be American.

Because of the peculiarities of its long history, Britain has in modern times never felt the need for such a statement. But in an era of decentralized government and citizens who tend to define themselves less by their similarities than by differences of region, ethnicity or religion, the government feels that the time is ripe for one.

The proposal, part of a package of British-pride-boosting measures announced last year, raised a host of tricky questions. What does it mean to be British? How do you express it in a country that believes self-promotion to be embarrassing? And how do you deal with a defining trait of the people you are trying to define – their habit of making fun of worthy government proposals?

Detractors spread the rumor that the government was looking, not for a considered statement, but for a snappy, pithy “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”-style slogan that it could plaster across government buildings in a kind of branding exercise.

Nor did it help when The Times of London cynically sponsored a British motto-writing contest for its readers.

The readers’ suggestions included “Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco” (Asbo stands for “anti-social behavior order,” a law-enforcement tool, while Tesco is a ubiquitous supermarket chain); “One Mighty Empire, Slightly Used”; “We Apologize for the Inconvenience”; and – the choice favored by 20.9 percent of the readers – “No Motto, Please, We’re British.”

Read more >> IHT 

TRUST is the bedrock of business everywhere, but the sources from which it springs are different. In Japan, where reputation and relationships are considered precious, the informal cues are as important as the legalistic ones. Parties take their time discussing deals. Managers meet to exchange meishi—their all-important business cards (usually presented with two hands)—and bow respectfully. It helps to establish confidence.

So it was that when a handful of bankers from Lehman Brothers met executives of Marubeni, one of Japan’s largest trading houses, at Marubeni’s headquarters across from the Imperial Palace last autumn, they never suspected that they were actually being drawn into a massive fraud. The teams had met numerous times to discuss a bridge loan. Reams of paperwork were supplied. In a convoluted agreement, Lehman provided more than $350m in financing to a small firm with ties to Marubeni (and founded by a cousin of the empress of Japan); the trading house guaranteed repayment.

Read more >> The Economist 

Effective leadership styles in China is the subject of one of the four videos featuring professors from China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai.

The others deal with marketing in China, talent management in China and dealing with business dilemmas in China. Accompanied by case studies and an interview with Jack Ma, founder and chief executive of Alibaba.com, the recordings, which can be viewed on the Financial Times website, are accompanied by transcripts and recommendations for further reading.

Video 1: Professor Willem Burgers discusses marketing in China and how western multinationals can surprisingly learn much from Chinese companies’ innovative, counterintuitive and holistic approach to marketing in China.

Video 2: Professor Arthur Yeung discusses Talent Management in China and how the best employers – both Chinese companies and foreign multinationals – manage, recruit and retain people to win the talent war in China.

Video 3: Professor Henri-Claude de Bettignies discusses Cross Cultural Awareness and Dilemmas for Doing Business in China and looks at what expatriate managers can do to cope with the unique conflicts of interest they may face especially in China.

Video 4: Professor Juan Antonio Fernandez discusses Leadership for Success in China and shares insights from China-based CEOs on what leadership styles work well on the mainland.

Video 5: Jack Ma, founder and chief executive of Alibaba.com, shares his perspectives with Arthur Yeung, Philips chair professor of human resource management at CEIBS, on:

* How to overcome the challenges of starting a business in China
* His personal philosophy on managing people and discovering their “entrepreneurial spirit”
* What companies seeking entry into China should do to succeed

See the videos at >> The FT 

Had he been president of Indonesia, not France, Charles de Gaulle might have modified his famous saying about cheeses and asked how to govern a nation with over 700 different languages. The answer, as elsewhere in South-East Asia, was to impose a “national” tongue.

As the region’s countries became independent, most wanted their citizenry to speak the same indigenous language. But choosing an acceptable candidate sometimes proved difficult, laying the ground for “language wars” that still rage.

A new collection of essays* from the Singapore-based Institute of South-East Asian Studies (ISEAS) reviews the region’s struggles to build monolingual nations. Several themes emerge: first, globalisation is forcing governments to reconsider restrictions on daily use of English; second, with the economic rise of China, governments increasingly see their ethnic-Chinese populations as assets rather than threats; and third, democratisation and decentralisation may revive local and tribal languages. Each of these trends may undermine the quest for a unifying national language.

Read more >>  Language wars