Intercultural Communication and Translation News

“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.

Read the full article at Intercultural Twilight Zone

The Foreign Office has advised Britons to make themselves aware of local laws before they make trips to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

According to the department’s latest British Behaviour Abroad report, it is in Middle-Eastern states where Britons are most likely to fall foul of the authorities.

“The report highlights just how many British nationals encounter difficulties whilst abroad,” commented Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant.

Brits were proportionally more likely to have been jailed in the UAE than in any other country, the study showed, although most arrests were made in Spain (2,290).

Mr Bryant noted: “Researching the local laws and customs before you travel could avoid time in a foreign jail.”

Customers who use Lastminute.com can now enter some well known phrases into their search and get a translation into a number of British accents. Visitors to the site can ask how to say things with a Geordie, Glaswegian, Mancunian, Scouse and Brummie as well as the accent of the Bristol folk.

One example for travellers to Newcastle would be how to ask for a flight to Barcelona, which would go something like this; “Howay man! Aa’d leik te gan bi plane te Barcelona.” This new tool could help many who struggle to with the different accents of British residents. However it could get messy if a customer from Japan was trying the lingo.

Read more > LastMinute.com

Scottish Parliament chiefs sparked disbelief last night after a firm in India was hired to translate their annual report into GAELIC.

A company based 5,000 miles away in Bangalore landed the Holyrood job when it managed to undercut rivals for the contract by 40 per cent.

But the Asian operation is STILL having to recruit Gaelic speakers back in Scotland to do the work for them.

Last night baffled Highlands MSP Peter Peacock said: “I am flabbergasted that the Scottish Parliament has turned to a company in India to translate the official report into Gaelic.”

Holyrood already employs two Gaelic language staff. But they were deemed “too busy” to deal with translating the 40-page document.

Read more > The Sun

This morning in Dubai, Yahoo! begins learning a new language – Arabic. We’ve just announced our intent to acquire Maktoob.com, the leading online community in the Arab world. To put this in perspective, Maktoob reaches one in every three people online throughout the region –- or 16.5 million people. This will be Yahoo!’s biggest geographic expansion in years.

This deal is part of Yahoo!’s broader strategy to grow our international business, particularly in emerging markets. In many countries, vast populations — and advertisers — are just starting to come online. The potential is tremendous. Yahoo! has a large and growing audience in these markets today, and our acquisition of Maktoob represents the kind of investment we’re making to cater to the needs of these promising regions.

We plan to join forces with the Maktoob team, the strongest in the region, to create locally relevant content, services, and programming. That’s no easy task when you consider the differences between countries like UAE, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But we’re committed to literally translating our winning formula for this growing market in many ways, including through locally-based editorial teams.

Initially, we’ll plan to introduce Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search, and our homepage and then eventually local versions of properties like News, Sports, and Finance. We’ll also focus on creating content and services tailored to the region. No other global company has made this kind of investment in local relevance for the Arab world.

Arabs are vastly underserved by today’s Internet offerings. The World Bank estimates that there are 320 million Arabic speakers around the globe, yet less than one per cent of online content is written in their language (despite a vibrant Arabic blogosphere). We have a big opportunity to meet this growing demand, and we think Yahoo!, building on Maktoob’s local expertise, brings the scale and heft to draw many more people online in the region –- and we plan to give them compelling reasons to log on.

We also recognize the Middle East is deeply complex, a complexity mirrored in the online world, and that it will present certain challenges. As an Internet pioneer in the emerging markets, we’ve learned important lessons and we’re committed to responsible global engagement. This means being sensitive to local laws, customs, and norms while also protecting and promoting the rights of our users. We believe our engagement in the Middle East can be a positive force for people by increasing access to information, supporting a thriving marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and bridging local, regional, and international communities.

It’s easy to forget the fastest growing Internet audiences are in the emerging markets. That’s not lost on us. We’re passionate about growing our presence in places like Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, and Africa. And we can’t wait to yodel in the Middle East.

In an effort to keep things brief here on Yodel, we have provided a link to the press release and we have also created an informational site that should answer many of your questions.

Keith Nilsson
Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets

Cited from > Yahoo!

A firm that does language translation for the police and NHS has slashed pay for workers by up to 50%.

Language Line Services provides instant help when, for example, someone calls who doesn’t speak English.

They are put through to a network of freelance inter-preterwho often work from home.

They used to earn up to 35p a minute during the day and 50p at night.

But a memo seen by Your Money reveals the rate has been cut to 24p at all times.

“We appreciate this will not be welcome news,” it reads. One worker fumed: “We have no benefits or security whatsoever and the profit they make from our services is obscene.”

Language Line claimed it affected about 200 workers, and added: “Prices are being driven down by customers and we have had to act.”

Read more > Language Line

Tourists visiting Shanghai for next year’s World Expo could be confused by signs on wet floors reading “Slip Carefully!”

So authorities in China want to make sure they never see them.

The Shanghai government, along with neighbouring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, published a 20-page guide book this week to standardise signs and eliminate notoriously bad, and sometimes amusing, English translations.

“A number of the English translations are quite baffling, others are simply awkward,” Xue Mingyang, director of the Shanghai Education Commission, was quoted as telling the China Daily.

The official campaign prompted local media to share favourite mistranslations.

At Shanghai’s iconic Oriental Pearl Tower, visitors are warned “Ragamuffin, drunken people and psychotics are forbidden to enter”, according to the Shanghaiist city blog.

A malfunctioning online translation tool may have helped a restaurant named “Translate server error” get its photo published in Tuesday’s Oriental Morning Post. The sign’s Chinese characters merely read “Restaurant”.

The nearly 400 standard translations included in the guidelines were devised by linguists and experts from Shanghai universities.

They range from the basic labelling of men’s and women’s toilets to a stern “No Smoking, Eating, Drinking or Loitering”.

Read more > Shanghai

Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called Translations, which took the time-consuming and costly task of translating the site and crowd-sourced it, asking the network’s millions of users to lend a hand.

The process proved to be very efficient: Facebook launched a Spanish site in Feburary 2008, only a few weeks after unveiling the app, and by June it had support for 16 more languages. It’s now up to over 60, including right-to-left reading languages like Hebrew. And now, Facebook is trying to patent the process that helped turn it into an international goliath.

Read more > Facebook

A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently.

East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face.

In the research carried out by a team from Glasgow University, East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions.

The work published in Current Biology journal challenges the idea facial expressions are universally understood.

In the study, East Asians were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for “fear” as “surprise”, and “disgust” as “anger”.

The researchers say the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.

East Asian participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth.

Read more > Global Faces

Employers will find it more difficult to recruit skilled migrants from overseas if the government accepts proposals to further tighten up the immigration system, a law firm has warned.

Alarm bells were sounded by Speechly Bircham following a Migration Advisory Committee report on the points-based immigration system, which outlines how the UK could do more to protect jobs for British workers.

Recommendations include:

*A requirement that migrant workers outside of the EU will earn £20,000 and workers without qualifications will earn at least £32,000
* Increasing the application fees for Tier 2 (the skilled workers category for those from outside the EU)
* Increasing the period that a role has to be advertised in the UK to four weeks
* Increasing the period before an employee can transfer from an overseas branch to the UK via an intra-company transfer from six months to 12 months.

Tracy Evlogidis, head of immigration at Speechly Bircham, said: “It is clear from the recommendations that employers will face an incredibly difficult task in recruiting skilled migrants from overseas, no matter how special they are and who they are.

Read more > Immigration