Not lost in translation

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes,  February 20, 2007

Not Lost in Translation

By PAUL BURNHAM FINNEY

With corporate travelers now doing business in all four points of the
globe, developing some fluency in foreign languages is getting to be as
important as taking along a laptop on an overseas trip. On a visit to
Moscow a friendly kak dela (how are you doing?) can be an icebreaker when
meeting a Russian contact, and an obrigado (thank you)  when you exit a
session in So Paulo may be just enough Portuguese to charm your Brazilian
host. Veterans of the overseas business circuit say that despite the
spread of English worldwide, those linguistic gestures promote familiarity
by showing that you have done your homework and care about getting along.

I have five phrases wherever I go, said Sally A. Painter, a managing
director of Dutko Global Advisors, a public-policy management firm, who
takes overseas business trips two weeks a month to places as diverse as
Argentina, Cambodia and Latvia. Good day. How are you? Thank you very
much. Its been a pleasure to see you. And many thanks, she said. Thats
about it for my basic repertoire. I wish I had better language skills.
Business travelers insist that those snippets go a long way to impress
foreign contacts. And it is no easy task mastering even a few phrases if
the language is Mandarin, the hottest newcomer on the language-training
scene. There is a big boom in the demand for it, said Thomas Uehara,
director of United States operations for Berlitz International, arguably
the best-known provider of language training. (Arabic is a distant
second.)

Aware of the value of dealing in the mother tongue of their hosts, many
traveling employees are now taking crash courses to develop more elaborate
conversational skills. Business opportunities open up when you know what
people are saying and dont just depend on what a translator can tell you,
said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association
in New York. Our most popular course is five days with give-and-take
sessions for seven hours a day, Mr. Uehara said. Our students say that
after the second day, they start dreaming in the target language. Thats
when you know youre succeeding. The price for such a weeklong course is
$2,500 plus study materials.

Its lucrative getting executives primed to go, said Mike Ferrari, director
of merchandising at Barnes & Noble, who has seen a significant uptick in
sales of CD language guides. Theyll pay a premium for fast training.
Leading the pack of todays high-tech trainers is Fairfield Language
Technologies, which markets a CD-ROM self-learning system under the name
Rosetta Stone. Were projecting annual growth of about 150 percent in our
corporate business, the companys chief executive, Tom Adams, said. Intel,
for example, teaches its project engineers how to speak Chinese before
shipping them to China. Berlitz and Fairfield part ways on whether a live
instructor or a CD program is a better teacher.

The instructor-student partnership, as Berlitz explains it, allows for
considerable flexibility to fit individual needs. For instance, if you are
about to make a swing through Latin America, Berlitz can rotate Argentine,
Chilean, Colombian and Mexican teachers so that you can get acquainted
with different Spanish accents. On the other hand, the computer programs
are versatile you can plug them into your digital music player and learn
while jogging or killing time at the motor vehicle bureau, as one business
traveler put it. The venerable Berlitz, founded 128 years ago by
Maximilian Berlitz in Providence, R.I., and now owned by the Benesse
Corporation of Japan, is quietly updating its sacred methodology and going
high-tech with what it calls Berlitz Virtual Classrooms. It is really
Berlitz online: you can be located almost anywhere in the world, and if
you have a computer, a microphone and a headset or speakers, you can learn
any of some 50 languages online.

Despite the itch to become language-smart, frequent travelers like Ms.
Painter, the consultant, can easily fall back on English as the modern
lingua franca of global business. It is the superpowers language the one
that foreign executives encounter worldwide in much the same way that
French was a favorite among diplomats at one time. American business
travelers assume everyones going to know English, said Aaron Wunder, a
project manager at Healthy Companies International, which advises
executives on cultural matters like language fluency. I havent seen a big
increase in the commitment to learn foreign languages. In a 2002 survey of
corporate executives, Healthy Companies found that most American
executives could claim knowledge of only a smattering of another language.
By contrast, Dutch executives on average could handle four languages.

We couldnt survive in Holland without three or four languages at our
fingertips, said Hans Buchenau, a Dutch businessman. We speak Dutch, teach
English as the second language, and border on Germany and French-speaking
Belgium. There is more reason to gain an aptitude in foreign languages
than you might think, experienced world travelers say. For example, an
American executive who was checking into the White Swan in Guangzhou, the
former Canton, recalls how he was impressed by the staffs fluency in
English until he asked for directions to the mens room and got a reply:
Your luggage will be delivered to your room. Rote word practice is not the
same as understanding, he noted.

On a recent trip to Mumbai, India, Tom Russell, publisher of Random Houses
Living Language learning guides, ran across a commentary in a leading
Indian publication that pointed out the hazards of the new globish
language. It is a term used to describe the awkward English that is often
spoken abroad in fits and starts, he said. Its just enough for a foreigner
to get by in our tongue. Americans are getting a bit more adventurous with
languages, he acknowledged, but theyre afraid of making fools of
themselves. In any case, major American companies are refining their
thinking on how best to prepare employees for business dealings overseas.
Theyre letting them shop around and get reimbursed rather than pressuring
them to attend corporate classes, said Mr. Uehara of Berlitz. Backing up
this trend, Mr.  Adams of Rosetta Stone said that a lot of initiative is
coming from individual employees.

To make learning languages easier, educators use every device from Spanish
for Dummies and dolls that speak different languages to CD manuals you can
play while driving. They stay away from brain-numbing recitations of
French verbs.

Tailor it to the customer, said Juan Gutierrez, president of the Ultimate
Language Store in Richardson, Tex. Some students learn from foreign TV
stations and movies. We carry hundreds of foreign films. How about Lord of
the Rings in Italian?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/business/worldbusiness/20language.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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