Intercultural Communication and Translation News

The Oriental markets are emerging in the world as competitive and sought after. The Translation of oriental languages therefore has become crucial. For those who believe that language translation is simply a case of converting one language to another is sadly misguided especially where oriental languages are concerned. Every language has its own structure, phraseology and particular nuances. Dealing with detailed documents and manuals in translation means ensuring compatibility of text. One phrase in English may be completely misunderstood in another language. The oriental languages are very different in structure than English and other European languages. Alphabets are different, and, in some countries the text is written from right to left as in Arabic and Hebrew.
In Chinese the language is very different from that of our own and therefore difficult to translate. In Chinese writing for instance there are no letters and no alphabet. It consists of symbols that are used to represent words. The symbols cannot be broken down into smaller compartments in order to construct a new word. The translation of the language therefore represents a huge task when translating from English to Chinese or vice versa. Chinese written language and Japanese is structured from top to bottom.
The most pre-dominant oriental languages are Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Korean. Traditional Chinese is the language spoken in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao, whilst simplified Chinese is spoken in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore and is the official language of the United Nations.
It is easy to see why oriental language translation is something which requires diligence to detail so that meaning is not lost during the language translation and should only be undertaken with a native speaker who has a full knowledge of English, its particular nuances and how to make that compatible with the oriental language translation.
As discussed above, in China there are differences between simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese which involves different volumes of characters. Simplified Chinese has about 8000, whilst traditional can use around 13000. Only a certain number of characters are common in both languages. Again, this reinforces the need for expert native speaking oriental language translators.
The formatting required for oriental language translation is inherently different from English requiring different font sets. Oriental language scripts use about 2000 or more characters as opposed to European languages which only require about 200. The encoding systems therefore have to be developed accordingly to accommodate the large number of characters. To deal with oriental language translation online it is necessary to use Input Method Editors which is an operating system or program that can translate characters and symbols which are not found on the Latin alphabet system.
It will be very clear that oriental language translation is certainly not something which can be viewed as simple. It is time consuming, requires the right and well educated native language speaker who can provide the compatible translation if the message is to be understood and, there is also a need for the right input systems to accommodate the oriental language. business in Asia is fast moving and it is a market worth garnering so to consider the appropriate oriental language translation is paramount.

A small team of Kwintessential Project Managers got together to assess who are currently writing the best blogs on the web. To see who came in our top ten please visit > Top Ten Translator’s Blogs 2010

If you kiss in public, forget to flush the toilet or wear a mask you may be surprised to find yourself in hot water in some countries.

Here are 15 lesser-known acts that may breach the etiquette rules of some of the most popular tourist detinations around the world.

1) St. Louis, Missouri, US
Propriety is important in any city, and St Louis in no exception. But girls, don’t get caught out without proper clothes on in a fire – it is actually illegal for firemen to rescue women who are still in their nightdresses or other various underwear attire. Interestingly, it’s also illegal to sit on the curb of any city street and drink beer from a bucket – so no drunken tourist antics here, please.

2) United Arab Emirates
As the two Britons who were convicted for having sex on the beach near their hotel in Dubai in 2008 will tell you, public nudity is a criminal offence in the UAE. It goes without saying, then, that if a kiss on the cheek can get you fined or imprisoned, having sex in public is an absolute no-no.

3) Denmark
This may sound crazy but it’s true – wearing a mask in Denmark could get you arrested. Best keep those Halloween costumes in your suitcases.

4) Scotland
Guys, if you are gripped by the desire to don traditional Scottish dress in the form of a kilt, there are a couple of things you need to remember. Whether you decide to wear underwear under your kilt or not is entirely up to you, and wearing nothing is actually completely acceptable. What you need to remember is not to tell people about what you’ve decided – or show it off – unless you are invited to!

5) Mexico
Aside from the great level of respect  reserved for elders in Mexican society, there’s another important thing to know when travelling there, and it has to do with love. If you fall for a Mexican on your travels, it’s actually the man’s parents who ask the woman’s parents for permission for their children to marry and be accepted into the family. So really, the pressure’s off guys, and it’s up to your parents.

Read more > news.com

On a day when SwedishAmerican Health System was celebrating attention to quality care, members of its physician resident and nursing staffs were learning how attention to cultural diversity can play into that quality.

Dr. Robert C. Like, professor and director of the Center for Healthy Families and Cultural Diversity in the Department of Family Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., spoke today at the hospital’s grand rounds about caring for patients from several ethnic, racial and sociocultural backgrounds as cultural competence in health care becomes more important in treating changing populations.

“A lot of people think of this as PC, or political correctness, run amok,” said Like, who traces his interest in cultural diversity back to hearing stories of his grandparents’ struggles after they immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union and Israel. “I like to think of PC as being personally and professionally caring.

“Doctors will ask ‘Do you expect me to learn about every culture on the planet?’ and the answer is ‘No, it’s not possible,’ but by communicating with each other we can learn.”

The aim, Like said, is elimination of all stereotypes.

Read more > rrstar.com

Since its earliest days, the Internet filled us with the hope of uniting all of humanity. With information traveling at the speed of light, we thought, geographic location wouldn’t matter and anyone who shared our interests would be within reach.

But there’s an age-old problem working against our utopian dreams of the web uniting the world: the language barrier. After all, it doesn’t matter what you have access to if you can’t read it.

In the first couple decades of the Internet, we had a simple, if unsustainable, solution. Most people used English — even if it wasn’t their native language.

Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the multi-lingual blog network Global Voices, observed this phenomenon as recently as 2004.  He was at dinner with a couple dozen bloggers in Amman, Jordan who were chatting away in Arabic.

“But almost all of them were blogging in English at that point,” Zuckerman explains. “Out of that group of people that I had dinner with, a lot of those people blog in Arabic now. And I’ve gone back and talked to some of them… and one said to me, ‘When we were trying this in 2004 there were very few Arabic speakers online, and we just couldn’t write for that audience. But now our friends, our peers, our neighbors are all online. That’s who we want to reach.’”

The numbers support this anecdote. According to Internet World Stats, Arabic users on the Internet have increased by more than 2,000 percent over the past decade. Chinese will soon replace English as the most-used language on the web. And dozens of other languages are experiencing huge growth. On the one hand this is great:  the more people who come online, the better. But as they join the web using different languages, how do we stop the internet from fracturing along language lines?

Many think a big part of the solution will be machine translation. Translation software has been around for decades with a mediocre track record, but Google’s translation service, Google Translate, is producing impressive results and improving quickly.

Read more > NPR

The Guardian’s Tim Parks argues it’s time to acknowledge translators – the underpaid and unsung heroes behind the global success of many writers….

Milan Kundera fears translation could make his style banal.

Who wrote the Milan Kundera you love? Answer: Michael Henry Heim. And what about the Orhan Pamuk you think is so smart? Maureen Freely. Or the imaginatively erudite Roberto Calasso? Well, that was me.

The translator should do his job and then disappear. The great, charismatic, creative writer wants to be all over the globe. And the last thing he wants to accept is that the majority of his readers are not really reading him.

His readers feel the same. They want intimate contact with true greatness. They don’t want to know that this prose was written on survival wages in a maisonette in Bremen, or a high-rise flat in the suburbs of Osaka. Which kid wants to hear that her JK Rowling is actually a chain-smoking pensioner? When I meet readers of my own novels, they are disappointed I translate as well, as if this were demeaning to an author they hoped was “important”.

There is complicity between globalisation and individualism; we can all watch any film, read any book, wherever made or written, and have the same experience. What a turn-off to be reminded that in fact we need an expert to mediate; what the Chinese get is a mediated version of me; what I’m reading is a mediated Dostoevsky.

Read more > Guardian

The opening of a new Tesco usually means shelves full of groceries. But the opening of a Tesco Academy next year in Seoul, South Korea, will be yet another example of business schools supplying education to the big grocery chains as they expand overseas.

It is a welcome opportunity for schools that have been trying to attract corporate clients in a tough recession – and supermarkets are tough clients. They require business school partners to deliver programmes attuned to their needs while also being global in their approach.

Tesco is Britain’s largest supermarket and one of the leading global retailers, along with Walmart and Carrefour. Two-thirds of its floor space is overseas and South Korea is one of its biggest non-UK markets.

It is leaning increasingly on business schools as it expands, especially calling on Ashridge in the UK, Insead in France and Singapore, and Ceibs in China. “Business schools give us international perspective and understanding of different cultures,” says Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Tesco’s executive director for corporate affairs.

“Now that we’re operating in 14 significant overseas markets, and sourcing from many more, we need to help our people develop good cross-cultural understanding,” she says. “We’re trying to prepare them for the next decade.”

Read more > FT

Brits are boorish, French flatter, Scandinavians play it cool, and Italians get intimate. Everyone does it, but how we flirt depends largely on our culture and a host of unspoken rules.

“Basically we are descended from a long line of successful flirts and it is hard-wired into our brains,” social anthropologist Kate Fox told AFP. “If we didn’t initiate contact with the opposite sex, then we wouldn’t reproduce, and the species would die out.”

Those searching for a soul mate or just for a bit of fun may welcome some guidelines to help in sharpening their skills, ready for a bit of banter and eyelash battering all in the hope of catching one of Cupid’s arrows.

Read more > Expatica