Intercultural Communication and Translation News

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