Intercultural Communication and Translation News

The term ‘culture’ addresses three salient categories of human activity: the ‘personal,’ whereby we as individuals think and function as such; the ‘collective,’ whereby we function in a social context; and the ‘expressive,’ whereby society expresses itself.

Language is the only social institution without which no other social institution can function; it therefore underpins the three pillars upon which culture is built.

Translation, involving the transposition of thoughts expressed in one language by one social group into the appropriate expression of another group, entails a process of cultural de-coding, re-coding and en-coding. As cultures are increasingly brought into greater contact with one another, multicultural considerations are brought to bear to an ever-increasing degree. Now, how do all these changes influence us when we are trying to comprehend a text before finally translating it? We are not just dealing with words written in a certain time, space and socio-political situation; most importantly it is the “cultural” aspect of the text that we should take into account. The process of transfer, i.e., re-coding across cultures, should consequently allocate corresponding attributes vis-a-vis the target culture to ensure credibility in the eyes of the target reader.

Read more > Translation & Culture

People in Europe and Asia buy consumer goods, drink cafe lattes and dine on burgers. So why is it so hard for U.S. companies to expand overseas? Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), Starbucks (SBUX) and McDonald’s (MCD) and many American-based players ran into growing pains, missteps and outright failures when opening outlets abroad.

Mastering cultural differences and understanding European, Asian or Latin American customers affect bottom-line results. The companies that make the cultural adjustments thrive, and the inflexible retailers either adapt or fail.

“Americans think if they are well-intentioned and go overseas or anywhere, they’ll be successful. Being well-intentioned isn’t enough,” said Charlene Solomon, a management consultant who co-wrote “Managing Across Cultures” with Michael S. Schell. She says businesspeople need to understand cultural differences and pinpoint what global customers want from their product.

Read more > Investors.com

Beloved Belgian cartoon reporter Tintin is getting a makeover in China thanks to a new, more faithful Mandarin translation of his adventures.

Wang Bingdong, who first discovered Herge’s comic strip hero in 2001 at the age of 66, spent three years penning the new version of 22 Tintin books — a painstaking task he says was a pure delight.

“I really found myself feeling happy as I was translating — I felt younger with Tintin and the other members of the Tintin family by my side every day,” Wang told AFP with a grin.

The new Chinese edition includes nearly all of Tintin’s stories — “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” was deemed too anti-communist by the country’s censors for its criticism of the Soviet Union.

Read more > Tintin

For John Tolva, IBM’s Chicago-based director of citizenship and technology, the value of his four-week assignment to Ghana last year really hit him during a game of Scrabble by candlelight.

He and teammates from India, Germany, Brazil, and other countries had agreed on an unorthodox rule: You could use any language you knew. “That’s when I understood what a globally integrated enterprise looks like,” he says.

He and the others were forced to ask “what connects us,” since it obviously wasn’t language or culture. The real connection, Tolva says, is “the values that IBM has instilled in us. It’s a professional code that isn’t written down — but it’s there.”

Read more > CNN

Technologies tend to be global, both by nature and by name. Say “television”, “computer” or “internet” anywhere and chances are you will be understood. But hand-held phones? For this ubiquitous technology, mankind suffers from a Tower of Babel syndrome. Under millions of Christmas trees North and South Americans have been unwrapping cell phones or celulares. Yet to Britons and Spaniards they are mobiles or móviles. Germans and Finns refer to them as Handys and kännykät, respectively, because they fit in your hand. The Chinese, too, make calls on a sho ji, or “hand machine”. And in Japan the term of art is keitai, which roughly means “something you can carry with you”.

This disjunction is revealing for an object that, in the space of a decade, has become as essential to human functioning as a pair of shoes. Mobile phones do not share a single global moniker because the origins of their names are deeply cultural. “Cellular” refers to how modern wireless networks are built, pointing to a technological worldview in America. “Mobile” emphasises that the device is untethered, which fits the roaming, once-imperial British style. Handy highlights the importance of functionality, much appreciated in Germany. But are such differences more than cosmetic? And will they persist or give way to a global mobile culture?

Read more > Economist

After an attempted terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, President Obama revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had collected but then failed to piece together different threads of information about the suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Sound familiar? Just like the many warnings that were captured but went untranslated prior to 9/11, this latest incident highlights one of the U.S. government’s biggest counter-terrorism challenges – multilingual information management.While the attempted December attack differs from the pre-9/11 warnings in that, to our knowledge, it did not involve translation, the lesson is the same: managing flows of information across multiple countries, languages, and cultures is a complex undertaking. It requires both money and planning.

However, money isn’t really the problem. As a new report from Common Sense Advisory shows, the U.S. federal government spent US$4.5 billion on translation and interpreting services over the last 20 years (from 1990 through 2009). Most of these funds were disbursed in the past few years alone.

Read more > Global Watchtower

A new year and a new tool on the Kwintessential website!

The transliteration tool phonetically converts a word written in one script into another. Transliteration should not be confused with translation, which involves a change in language while preserving meaning. With transliteration, it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other.

The transliteraion tool currently only supports the following languages – Bengali (bn), Gujarati (gu), Hindi (hi), Kannada (kn), Malayalam (ml), Marathi (mr), Nepali (ne), Punjabi (pa), Tamil (ta), Telugu (te) and Urdu (ur).

Try it out > Transliteration Tool