Archive for Cultures

GregRosner | March 16, 2010
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Is Knowledge in the Cloud?

How our minds may not have caught up with technology when it comes to the accessing information.

evolution to computer man

This is an observation about how people (still like me) who sometimes still think it’s important to collect information, when that same information is freely available at anytime, most anywhere for viewing on line. I consciously resist this vestigial urge to download and save information on my laptop. Maybe this is a habit from the good old days of bookshelves and libraries in our offices. For example, yesterday I clicked on a link to view a PDF presentation on managing change with website translation, and after reading it, I thought to myself that I should “keep” a copy of this on my laptop in case I need it. But then I thought to myself, “why should I clog my hard-drive with megabytes of stuff if I can get a copy of this at this web site anytime, and bookmark it instead.”

Apple's iPad available in April 2010 will surely change the way people access and keep information.

Like Amazon's Kindle did with digital books, Apple's iPad available in April 2010 will surely help change the way people access and keep information.

“Can you please send me a brochure about your translation services?” We get this request all the time from prospects. Not to mention the negative impact it has on our environment to print and send collateral, people who ask for a printed brochure  have this leftover mindset about how information needs to be “kept” and sorted, which hasn’t evolved as fast as our technology. When you go to trade shows, it’s common to see companies handing out paper brochures, most of which I think end up in landfill, but serve only as a reminder for that person to go to their website.

“Can you translate this manual so we can print it and ship it to our European distributors?”  Even though printing and shipping of translated material is so “twentieth century”, I still hear this from clients once in a while. And even though printing is so much cheaper when it’s distributed versus centralized, I wonder how much of the brochures, manuals, catalogs, booklets and reference guides we translate actually get printed and “shipped”, or rather just get put up as a link on a companies web site instead. (Comments anyone?) And I further wonder how many of their audience in different countries “save and print” files they download for future reference on their computers, or whether they just “bookmark” the page for future reference. (Question for you – please comment – do you save and download or just bookmark?)

google syncAnd speaking of bookmarks, Google has now made it possible for you to sync your (now extremely valuable to have wherever you are) bookmarks on any computer you are using, so you could actually have access to everything you previously seen and wanted to save, from any computer.

So then it hit me – that this desire we have to collect knowledge and information as things we can hold in our hands has not evolved with the technology we use to access it. There was a time in my life when information was a scarce and valuable resource. I think now of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which my parents bought me and my brother when we were kids. These massive books filled with tiny text, diagrams, pictures and maps, 2 inch think, 3 pounds each, and we had about 20 of them in a custom made shelf. I think I got more use out of them as a drum set or as stools than I did for research reports. (Guess that doesn’t speak to well for what I’ve learned then does it.)

brochure pilePrevious to the web, information was something people had to collect, libraries had to store, and the more you can memorize and have “on hand” the more successful you were told you would be. Memorization of facts like, who was the 23rd US President, for example, was drilled into you as a kid. (Benjamin Harrison,  with a little help from google :) ) But now that information is readily available at the click of your mouse, old habits are still much harder to break.

Some things don’t change.

What hasn’t changed is the need to translate communications. In fact, since distribution and availability of information is free relatively instantaneous, and the growth of “opensource” as a means for collaboration, the need for content to be available in German, Spanish, French and Chinese – has increased, because of the web. What companies call internally focused websites, “Intranet”, “Knowledgeshare”, or perhaps less glamorously named, “Repositories”, are where companies store a lot of the information which we translate for them for their global employees and partners.

Category: Cultures, Languages, Localization, Technology, Translation |
Jonathan.Bates | March 10, 2010
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Come fly with me..out of the recession

After the economic struggle of the last two years and with travel and tourism being one of the worst affected industries, we are only just beginning to see a rise from the ashes, just in time for British Tourism Week, which is from 15th – 21st March.

With summer fast approaching and consumers jumping back into holiday mode, now is the time to be communicating with your international audience, as they turn to the world wide web in search of the best package deals, flights, hotel bookings and car hire.

As frugal consumers (and let’s face it, who isn’t one these days?) from every region of the world start to look for the best deals, the UK, as the 6th most popular holiday destination worldwide, is  fast becoming a very popular prospect indeed. According to visitbritain.org, over 40 million visitors to the UK spend over £16 billion between them each year.

With the serious decline in the value of the pound there’s no reason why those figures can’t rise in a similar fashion. However, less people are in fact travelling to Britain – the number of people travelling to Britain (on inbound holiday or short-stay flights, at least) today is almost 2% less than this time last year. This was compounded, or perhaps caused, by an annual 4% drop in global tourism last year, which makes the market more competitive than ever.

To be Frank, the tourism industry could help itself with localization

To be Frank (sorry), the tourism industry could help itself with localization

Now, you might be led to believe that attracting new customers in the tourism industry has always involved investing in localization – but I wouldn’t be so sure that this is the case.

In fact, many online industry operators still only operate in a single language.

It’s crucial to speak to existing and potential customers in their own tongue. The Common Sense Advisory revealed that international customers are four times more likely to buy from a local language site.

At Applied Language Solutions, we focus heavily on supporting the tourism sector with localization services.

We have teams of specialist linguists covering a wide variety of languages who are both experienced in the industry, online marketing and, crucially, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

As well as offering quality localisation, delivering your messages into any language and country, we’ve added the “kill two birds with one stone” service, by adding localized SEO services to ensure more visitors are attracted to your offers in the first place.

With people worldwide warming to the idea of holidays and trips abroad, the time is right to localize your site and capture audiences that speak different languages.

Likewise, if you want to attract new visitors to your hotel, golf course or even your town (anywhere that a tourist might be interested in visiting) – get in touch and we can open your business up to new audiences straight away.

Category: Cultures, Localization, Technology, Translation | Tags: , ,
Matthew Connaughton | March 4, 2010
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Toyota recalls: Reaction and cross-cultural criticism

It’s a marketer’s nightmare. Your hugely successful product has a flaw that affects performance and user safety, prompting a global product recall. But what should you do if, like in the case of Toyota, you’ve been “too late” to act?

“The key thing to remember is delayed communication can be just as damaging as a poorly judged action, if not more so. Therefore it is crucial that you hold you hands up, admit there is a problem, apologise then promise to do everything in your power to resolve it with minimum impact on customers – quick and honest communication will give your brand the best chance to make it out the other side of a crisis.” says ALS Head of Marketing & PR and crisis communications specialist, Anna Simpkins.

Akio Toyoda“Product flaws are inevitable from time to time, but people can be very forgiving if they feel they are being listened to and   that someone within the business is taking responsibility.”

There has been much said about Toyota’s response to safety fears over their Pruis and Corolla models in recent weeks, and the company commenced the recall process, although perhaps a bit more slowly than customers and the media would have liked.

To quote Toyota President, Akio Toyoda (pictured), the automotive giant has “failed to promptly analyse and respond” to the safety issues that have plagued them for months.

Once the product flaws are dealt with, the marketing departments are then faced with the unenviable task of assessing the extent of the brand damage and working out how to rebuild customer trust.

This task, in Toyota’s case, is even greater as it is a global issue and the fact that they have, by their own admission, been “too late” to react. Toyoda even added “The problem has also been compounded by poor communications both within our company and with regulators and consumers.”

OK,  so Toyota may have been late to react, and to apologise, but some would say that their eventual handling of this crisis helped them to redeem themselves (which I would tend to agree with), meaning that all efforts can be focused on managing the global recall and minimising the threat of prolonged brand damage rather than fighting their way out of a media scrum.

How do cultural differences affect image?

Cultural awareness, as anyone who works in language services will tell you, is key for all communications. Not least when you’re trying to balance admitting your errors with trying to keep valued customers on-side.

How low to bow: Criticism of Toyota's handling of product flaws, and bowing, has intensified

How low to bow: Criticism of Toyota's handling of product flaws, and bowing, has intensified

Firstly, you can never learn enough from speaking to your own customers.  Asking for a frank assessment from customers is something ALS asks of its customers after every single project.

This provides us with areas for improvement, alerts us to any significant problems when they do arise, as well as the nice ego-boosting comments we tend to get for being so open.

Constant dialogue with our audiences means we are well positioned to deal with any crisis relating to  ALS services, should we ever need to (touch wood).

If you speak to most people in the UK, the general consensus would probably be to admit the mistake, offer to fix it quickly, and do so without added cost or convenience to the customer. Some customers might (either rightly or brazenly), ask for compensation of some kind – but the process is fairly straight forward in cultural terms.

Contrast that with other cultures, such as in Japan, where Toyota have even been criticised for bowing “incorrectly”. US President, Barack Obama didn’t even face that level of criticism, in a recent meeting with the Japanese premier.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of this was the heartfelt words from Toyota’s Yoshimi Inaba, in a meeting between members of Congress and Toyota bosses. The company’s North American President denied that there had been an instruction not to discuss liability for the fault, declared that “nothing costs Toyota more than loss of trust”.

What cultural differences have you noticed when dealing with complaints, or product/service flaws?

Category: Business Management, Cultures, Localization | Tags: , ,
Lauren Nemec | February 17, 2010
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What do Languages and DNA have in common?

They both mutate and face extinctions.

By Greg Rosner

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Languages: There are approximately 7,000 languages spoken today. About half of them may not exist in 25 years. But to think about a language as a static thing is wrong. This is the natural consequence of cultures being absorbed by larger (more savage or technologically advanced – take your pick) neighbors over thousands of years of human migration. These family/tribe/nation absorptions and/or exterminations of people have lead to some languages being spoken today by only one or two people on earth. (See my last blog on the death of Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language.) Some language extinctions, considering the last forty thousand years of our shared human history, have happened by adoption, by force, by conquest, and by whole populations dying in regional isolation. (Sad – but true.)

DNA: While all humans have 99.9% the exact same DNA, that point one percent carries billions of variations which make up all our different physical (and possibly other) traits as humans. According to modern genetic biologists, those differences have been mutating and diverging in modern humans for only about 150,000 years. All other hominids which existed on earth before and during this time, have all died out. It seems from the fossil record and from the DNA evidence, that all hominids died out 60,000 years ago, with the exception of a small population of humans living in eastern Africa, some 65,000 years ago. Language and DNA are similar in that they evolve, mutate and in many cases, die out.

We all know that since humans have populated the world, we have created civilizations, spread religions, fashioned languages, waged war on each other and died of all kinds of pandemics. But what I learned from my personal participation in the Genographic Project, (a joint effort between National Geographic and IBM to map the history of human DNA) was that many of these events have left a certain evidence in our DNA just as they have left sounds in our shared languages. All of this points to common ancestors as they migrated from East Africa, across every landscape imaginable on earth. Leading linguistic historians are now in agreement with the genetic biologists about how humans have migrated across the planet over the past 50,000 years.

While this continued extinction of about 3,500 spoken languages by 2035 seems inevitable, it is critical (and possible) that the details of these languages can be recorded and saved, else they too will be lost forever from the record. At the University of London, in the School of Oriental and African Studies, they are soon to be hosting “Endangered Languages Week 2010” who’s purpose is to present a variety of displays, discussions, films, and workshops to provide a view of what is happening to languages and what is being done to document, archive and support endangered languages around the world. The Endangered Languages Project seeks to “provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community”.

Language, like DNA, changes: When populations of people live in isolation for long periods of time, (say, a thousand years) their language changes and so does their DNA. It’s these tiny changes in DNA which allow genetic biologists like Dr. Spencer Wells of the Genographic Project to theorize about how populations of people have migrated across the earth over time.

While languages and DNA change with different rates of time, it has been natural for both to evolve and adapt into amazing differences. Take written and spoken Spanish in Latin America and Spanish in Spain, for example. Clearly, Spain did some conquesting south of the equator where they have deposited a good deal of their language some 400 years ago. And in those 400 years, the Spanish language diverged, in terms of the sound and written form.  Its grammar, syntax and style changed as people were separated by distance and the time it takes to travel across the ocean. You can even see this divergence of language between the US and its first major colonizer – England, with how we spell certain words. And to think that this divergence is only about three grandfathers old (234 years) is amazing.

Untitled2What I learned from my DNA Test: In exchange for $99 and a cotton small skin-scrap of my inner cheek, The Genographic Project emailed me a PDF file showing details of my Y Chromosome (Male lineage) inheritance of Haplogroup J2. I discovered that encoded in my blood is a document which can with the same certainty prove that I am the father of my son, prove how my ancient fathers and grandfathers (so to speak) migrated from the Mediterranean, and before that, the land which is considered today to be Iraq and Uzbekistan. And their great grandfathers migrated up from East Africa 40,000 years ago.

And since we’re on the topic of human evolution, I thought I would mention this fascinating article on the “Origins of Charles Darwin”. His great-great grandson Chris Darwin, (who is alive today and pictured here with a map of his families migration path) also participated in the Genographic Project recently and found out something that Charles would have never imagined. Chris’ results show that Darwin’s male ancestors would have migrated out of northeast Africa to the Middle East or North Africa around 45,000 years ago and belongs to Haplogroup R1b.” He’s a direct descendant “of the Cro-Magnon people who, beginning 30,000 years ago, dominated the human expansion into Europe and heralded the demise of the Neanderthal species.”

To think about all the languages that may have once existed, and how they were used to convey all the pains, knowledge and joys of our ancestors. And to think of what it sounded for my ancient grandmother to talk with her parents. It’s a humbling consideration and I do hope that the Endangered Languages Project is successful in recording as many languages as possible. I think this scientific research will help educate us all of us about who we are as a species and where we’ve come from.

Speaking of fathers and sons, my son made this poster for his recent school project. I thought it would be appropriate to show here given this post.

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Category: Cultures | Tags:
admin | February 9, 2010
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Regional dictionaries? The case for “Span-slang” (Spanish slang)

Laura Penfold -ALSBy Laura Penfold

Having both a degree in Spanish and Masters in Spanish translation from Leeds University, I was looking forward to showing off my linguistic skills on a recent trip to Mexico.

Now, my Spanish may have became somewhat (ahem) ‘rusty’ since I left university, but I thought I would at least get by asking simple questions such as ‘where are the toilets?’ and so on. However, to my dismay everyone looked at me blankly.

It eventually dawned on me that I was making simple mistakes, like using the word ‘servicios’ (commonly used throughout mainland Spain), when I should have been using ‘baños’, the Latin American equivalent.

The local ‘Slanglish’ conundrum

Alas! My errors should have become apparent to me sooner, but it all reminded me of what happens regularly at work. In an effort to reduce cost and turnaround many customers ask us to produce an International/Neutral Spanish translation, but there is a long-standing debate as to whether such a thing exists.

A translator can of course avoid any obvious slang words by keeping the language as standard as possible, but then it really isn’t targeted to a specific audience. This may be a real issue for marketing campaigns reaching out to a specific demographic.

Not the Spanish Inquisition, but rather a poignant question about Spanish langauge variants and the use of local terms & slang.

Not the Spanish Inquisition: Rather a poignant question about whether Spanish language variants and the use of local terms & slang justifies local dictionaries.

This got me thinking. How far should we go to address this as even in a country as small as England completely different words are used in different locations for many everyday items?

As a southerner now living in Leeds I am only too aware of this and working in Manchester I have even noticed the language barrier of the Pennines (among others)!

Admittedly most of these term are ‘slang’, but I wonder – as slang terms become more recognised as standard language (see John Dixon’s recent blog on Slanglish) will we one day end up with regional dictionaries?!

Well at least the nomenclature of Cocktails seems to remain international, as I didn’t have any trouble ordering those!

Category: Cultures, Languages, Localization | Tags: , ,
Lauren Nemec | January 29, 2010
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15.5 ways to fail miserably doing business in other countries

By Greg Rosner

PhotoWARNING: Do not follow this advice! This blog entry is intended to be funny, by explaining the opposite of what you should do to succeed. The point here is to exaggerate the mindset of approaching translation as an afterthought rather than as part of your global business strategy.

  1. Got employees overseas? Expect them to read and write English fluently.
  2. Do a business trip – once every decade.
  3. If you do visit, keep the business trip short and your meetings 20 minutes max. Forget the karaoke bar, the dinners, tell them what you want them to do and then leave.
  4. If you can’t pronounce their real names, give them nicknames like “Bob”, or “Jim”.
  5. If you don’t like their food, complain about it and describe what real food is like.
  6. Dictate the terms of your business to the locals. Expect compliance.
  7. Make no investment in the country. Customers will buy from you no matter what language they speak.
  8. Product literature translations? Don’t bother. If they can’t read English they probably don’t want your product.
  9. Keep your web site in English. (Even 3 year olds in America speak English – so should they)
  10. Ignore local law.
  11. Don’t hire a local partner.
  12. Offer your appraisal of their country’s politics and popular religion.
  13. Make fun of things in their country you don’t understand.
  14. Invite them to conference calls after lunch, say, at 2:00pm Pacific Standard Time, no matter where in the world they might be dialing in from.
  15. Critique their local government.

15.5  Try to change their culture.

Category: Cultures | Tags: , ,
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