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Latin Americans are the fastest growing population of Twitter users in the world, and are engaging in all forms of social media. Marketers who are attempting to access the potentially huge Hispanic market in the U.S. have a tough choice now: Spanish or English?

Andy Checo of Hispanic PR Chat gives his insight into this area. His main idea is this: language is ultimately irrelevant. Companies need to be “in-culture” in order to relate to their target audiences, no matter what the language.

He recommends using English if the majority of your target audience wouldn’t get the cultural message in Spanish. “We all know that if your audience is an acculturate Hispanic they will be able to relate to the bachata group Aventura as they would to Damien Rice, but can your non-Hispanic audience relate to Aventura?”

Use Spanish if your target audience is communicating in Spanish. “Are people commenting in Spanish? Asking you questions in Spanish? If so, why would you choose to communicate back in English?”

Spanglish is also an option, but again, it depends on the needs of your particular audience. Just listen to them!

Read Checo’s full advice post as originally posted on his website here, or reposted on hispanicPRblog here.

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.

While Chicago is no longer #1 in foreign language speakers, it’s still known as one of the country’s biggest melting pots. In fact, only one-third of Cook County residents speak only English. Nationwide, a new census report (data from 1980-2007) shows that the number of residents over 5 years old who speak a language other than English has more than doubled, equaling 20% of the population.

Chicago has seen an interesting linguistic shift due to a change in immigration patterns. While Spanish is still on the rise, many “old world” European languages like Yiddish and Italian are declining.

There was a time when Chicago didn’t have to be content with place- or show-honors in America’s linguistic derby. Its neighborhoods, the commerce association’s 1909 “Guide Book” said, “were really little cities within the metropolis, each speaking its only language, clinging to its hereditary customs, and in large part governing itself.”

For decades around the dawn of the 20th century, Chicago’s factories drew more immigrants from rural regions of Eastern and Southern Europe than any other U.S. city. Now, notes geographer Irving Cutler, Europeans looking for work don’t need to go overseas.

“With the European Union, they can move within the continent from where the jobs aren’t to where they are,” said Cutler, author of “Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent.”

That translates into the linguistic shift, notes Paral. In the 1920s, when the federal government imposed strict immigration quotas, 27 percent of Chicagoans were foreign-born. By 1970 that number had fallen to less than 10 percent, even as the great influx of Spanish speakers from Latin America was beginning.

Chicago still has more Polish speakers than any other city in the U.S., and comes in 2nd, 3rd or 4th in many other languages: “Arabic (4th), German (2nd), Greek (2nd), Gujarati (2nd), Hindi (3rd), Hungarian (4th), Italian (3rd), Korean (4th), Russian (3rd), Serbo-Croatian (2nd), Spanish (4th) and Urdu (2nd).”

Read the Chicago Tribune’s full report on its local language phenomenon here.

Want to improve your language skills? Visit Multilingual Chicago, offering private tutoring, conversation courses, and classes just for kids. It’s real language, for real life.

Chicago’s Chinatown is the 3rd largest in the United States, and is currently undergoing a linguistic and cultural shift from Cantonese to Mandarin. The People’s Republic of China standardized Mandarin as the national language in 1955, and now, many more immigrants are familiar with the language.

Immigrants from the northern part of China who speak Mandarin are deciding to settle outside of the traditionally Cantonese Chinatown, distancing the two Chinese communities.

“It’s the cultural background, in addition to the language problem, that makes people prefer one community over another,” [Susan] Ng-Harroun [executive director of the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce] said.

While the two language groups do interact at times within the community, such as for Chinese New Year celebrations, the limitations in conversational skills, coupled with different traditions, has led to more segregation than unity.

“The different dialects do reflect some cultural differences,” [David] Wu said. “The Chinese churches, restaurants and businesses outside of Chinatown are all Mandarin communities.”

Business owners see that Mandarin speakers won’t shop at Cantonese establishments. However, little by little, the signage in Chinatown is incorporating more simplified Chinese script, which Mandarin speakers typically read.

Read a full report of the shifting languages in Chinatown in this Medill article. Check out the article’s example of changing signage.

FIFA’s rule no. 6 prohibits “Using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures.” So, how can FIFA referees make a call on this rule when they don’t understand what a soccer player is saying?

Alex Stone, a FIFA spokesman, acknowledged that with at least 17 languages spoken by the 32 teams in the World Cup, it is impossible for referees to understand all of them.

“It’s not the words, it’s what they’re doing,” he said. “It’s what they’re saying or how they’re behaving.”

Civility and aggressive vulgarity are universally understood.

Last Saturday, the U.S. vs U.K. game was refereed by a team of Brazilians, who listen carefully to words they “might not have learned in school.” Wayne Rooney in particular is known for his sharp mouth and high emotions, for which he has been ejected on more than one occasion.

“We have to learn what kind of words the players say,” Altemir Hausmann, a referee’s assistant, told Globo TV Sports in Brazil. “All players swear and we know we will hear a few.”

Click here to read the full NYTimes report on this particular factor in the World Cup games.

Many Korean immigrants have recently found themselves in the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center taking classes in—what else?—Spanish. People like Sue Choe, who owns a laundromat in Koreatown, see many reasons to learn the language that many of her customers speak.

Aware of an ugly history between Korean-Americans and African-Americans–one that erupted into violence in some cities in the 1990s–Korean business owners are trying to soothe mutual suspicions with Spanish-speaking workers and customers. The effort is mostly born of an increasingly interdependent employer-employee relationship.

It is just one of the ways in which new waves of immigration and intermigration between neighborhoods is fast changing the city, mixing new combinations of ethnic groups together and forcing them to search for ways to coexist as so many previous generations of immigrants did.

Beginning a community dialogue is important, especially recalling the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles. It’s also important because Koreans and Hispanics don’t just live in the same communities, they work together too. Hispanics have become the primary labor pool for Korean business owners, and cultural differences have erupted in the workplace.

Latino workers, many earning less than the minimum wage, complain that their Korean bosses neglect to pay overtime and are often callous about days off or job-related injuries.

In turn Korean owners, at times unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, see ingratitude and disloyalty in their employees’ complaints. They argue that their up-from-the-ground businesses are a team effort that also has the owners working long hours.

Disputes have hurt both sides.  Learning to understand the cultures around you (and their languages) is a great start. Read the full Chicago Tribune article about this issue here.

Want to learn the languages spoken in your neighborhood? Visit MultilingualChicago.com to learn about language classes and workshops in your area!

With a fast growing Hispanic population in the U.S., poor Hispanic graduation rates could have huge consequences in the future of our nation. A new study called “Rising to the Challenge: Raising Hispanic Graduation Rates as a National Priority” shows that many of our 4-year colleges are graduating less than half of their Hispanic students.

Colleges and universities across the board graduate 51 percent of their Hispanic students versus 59 percent of their white peers.

When the study’s researchers examined graduation rates among similarly selective colleges and universities, they found considerable variation in Hispanic graduation rates, indicating that though student background is important, institutional practices also play a role.

“This data shows quite clearly that colleges and universities cannot place all of the blame on students for failing to graduate,” said Andrew P. Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute. “Colleges struggling to graduate their Hispanic students should learn from the successes of leaders like Whittier College, which has successfully closed the gap between its Hispanic and white students.”

So what can colleges to do to help retain Hispanic students? The student found that rates tend to improve with “an increased institutional focus on graduating all students, better consumer information, and reformed government funding that focuses on performance instead of enrollment.”

The low rates can’t be ignored. HispanicTips.com, reporting on this study, writes that “education beyond high school is critical for both a strong economy and the financial security of American families. Employees with higher education are more productive and earn more money than those who only graduated from high school.”

Read the full article here.