Workforce Language Services

As a translation manager, I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about mistranslations—everything from the shocking result of companies incorrectly punctuating ‘n’ in ‘año’ (that makes ‘year’ into ‘anus’ in Spanish), from the urban legend about Chevrolet’s “Nova” brand car, the car the wouldn’t go.

At the link below you’ll find a laughable list of translation and localization blunders. If you value your company’s message and want the same idea to come across in another language and culture, a little investigation goes a long way!

Here are just a few examples:

• Coca-Cola tried marketing its domestically successful two liter bottle in Spain. It finally withdrew the bottle from the Spanish market when it discovered that the refrigerator compartments were too small to hold the liter size. (eBook “How to Localize Products for Success in Foreign Markets” by Silk Road Communications.)
• A major soapmaker test marketed a soap name in 50 countries, and what it found was enough to make them change the name. The proposed name meant “dainty” in most European languages, “song” in Gaelic, “aloof” in Flemish, “horse” in one African language, “dim-witted” in Persian, “crazy” in Korean, and was obscene in Slavic languages” (Silk Road Communications eBook)
• When Pepsi began marketing it’s products in China, they were using a slogan that read “Pepsi Brings You Back to Life”. Translated into Chinese however, the slogan meant, “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave” (Business Link West Yorkshire website, www.blwy.co.uk)

Click here to read the full list.

The NYTimes Magazine preview just came out online, which takes a closer look at an intriguing idea: that our language (English, French, Japanese) shapes exactly how we think.

Let’s say that a person tells you “I saw my friend yesterday.” The English language doesn’t require the speaker to denote “male friend” or “female friend,” whereas Spanish, for example, obliges you to choose. Therefore gender explicitly becomes a part of the thinking process when processing language in Spanish, but not in English.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

A bigger question is: how does it work in practice?

Click here to read the full article.

Popular parenting blogs and websites show that many New York families are hiring babysitters to speak a second language with their children at home. When only a few years ago the trend was the opposite (only English-speaking nannies at home), New Yorkers now believe it’s important for their children to speak two or more languages.

That has certainly helped Elena Alarcón, a nanny born in Mexico who attended school in the United States. Ms. Alarcón recently completed 15 interviews with parents living in Brooklyn, and all of them insisted that if hired, she speak only Spanish with their children.

“I thought I would have to speak English with the families,” Ms. Alarcón said. “I was surprised they wanted me to speak only in Spanish.”

Ms. Alarcón now works for Yashmin Fernandes, who became fluent in Spanish living and working in Latin America. Ms. Fernandes speaks in Spanish with her daughter; her husband, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, speaks in English. “His family is the Spanish-speaking side,” Ms. Fernandes said, “but I was more adamant about getting a Spanish-speaking nanny.”

The New York Times, which reports on this trend, explains some of the benefits and disadvantages of trying to raise a child bilingually. For example, if the nanny is the only person speaking a second language, it probably won’t stick unless it’s also reinforced in another environment.

The WLS blog featured a study about raising bilingual children (http://workforcelanguageservices.com/blog/2009/07/24/sponges-inside-the-minds-of-bilingual-babies/) that explains benefits that the NYTimes article also mentions. There are significant cognitive differences between a bilingual child and one who speaks a single language. For example:

…bilingual children do better at complex tasks like isolating information presented in confusing ways. In one test researchers frequently use, words like “red” and “green” flash across a screen, but the words actually appear in purple and yellow. Bilingual children are faster at identifying what color the word is written in, a fact researchers attribute to a more developed prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive decision-making, like which language to use with certain people).

What’s important, above all, is for children to receive consistent exposure to both languages.

Read the full NYTimes article here.

The Inuits of Greenland, who are the world’s northernmost people, might only have 10 or 15 years left before climate changes and politics will force them to move and assimilate with other cultures. Only 1,000 people still speak their language, Inuktan.

Anthropologist Stephen Pax Leonard is going to live with the Inuit people for a year to record their conversations and traditional stories. Inuktan is an undocumented language.

Although most Inughuit are trilingual, also speaking Danish and Greenlandic, their primary language is still Inuktun.

“There is no doubt that this is a major linguistic challenge. … They speak a very pure form of Inuit, partly because of their geographic isolation. Their entire culture is based on a storytelling culture.”

Leonard, an anthropological linguist at Cambridge University, England, is under no doubt about the physical and cultural hurdles that face him. The average temperature is minus 25 degrees Celsius, although it can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter.

Leornard hopes to preserve a permanent record of the soon-to-be-lost culture and language.

CNN reports on Leonard’s journey here.