It can’t be denied — Hispanics and hard work go together like American business and cheap labor.

This partly explains why the rate of Hispanics who start their own businesses far outpaces the national average by a 3-1 ratio.

Many Hispanics see being their own boss as the only way to true prosperity here.

In 2002, there were 1.6 million Hispanic-owned establishments, a 31 percent jump from 1997. Today there are an estimated 2 million establishments with more opening each month.

Of those Hispanic-owned businesses, nearly half are owned by people of Mexican descent, and the majority are mom-and-pop operators

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The way we English-speaking Americans see ourselves at home and in the world is necessarily changing. No matter how often we hear that we live in a big, diverse, multicultural country and a global economy, it still surprises us to see English as just one of our languages, not the exclusive one.

That’s because many of us didn’t grow up with language pluralism. The multilingual packaging that frustrated the Sunday shopper is the result of the demands of a global marketplace that blossomed in the 1990s.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1992 by the first President Bush, requires multilingual packaging. Companies want to sell to Mexico and Canada as well as the United States without changing their packages. North America is one big store, and customers are a picky lot.

Mexican law requires that if you want to sell your widgets retail in Mexico, the label information in Spanish must be equally displayed with the English. To put it more plainly: The English can’t be bigger or more prominent on the packaging than the Spanish.

To make Canadian customers happy, a manufacturer will want not only to be sure the commercial information is in French but that the French is idiomatic, as spoken in Quebec, not in Paris.

Americans have been worrying about the erosion of English for decades. It may be some consolation to know that our neighbors in Quebec complain that, despite their best efforts to foster French, English remains the dominant language in the world for business, science and commerce.

That doesn’t mean English will be our sole language. The 2000 Census also found that 47 million people — almost one in five — speak a language other than English at home. The vast majority said they also speak English well. Only about 8 percent of people said they spoke English less than very well.

The reality is that votes in the Senate declaring English the “national language” and the “common and unifying language” were purely symbolic. The measures wouldn’t change a thing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said. In this country, federal law protects the rights of those who speak other languages.

A brochure, “Federal Protections Against National Origin Discrimination” by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, explains that federal laws prohibit discrimination based on a person’s national origin, ancestry, culture or language.

“This means,” the brochure says, “people cannot be denied equal opportunity because they or their family are from another country, because they have a name or accent associated with a national origin group, because they participate in certain customs associated with a national origin group, or because they are married to or associate with people of a certain national origin.”

The brochure is available in 17 languages, including English.

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Blogging has increasingly become more popular in China, with 52% of white-collar workers now keeping weblogs (blogs) according to CBP Career Consultants Co., Ltd., a leading career consulting firm in China.

Pictures from the Web log of a woman from Shanghai who goes by the pseudonym Mu Mu.
Unlike western bloggers who often focus on news and politics, the Chinese white collar bloggers see complaining alongside office and personal gossip as their priorities, according to the survey.

According to the findings of a blogging survey conducted by CBP among white-collar workers in China’s four largest cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – 52% responded they already had a blog, while another 28% said they plan to begin a blog in the near future.

“Weblogs have become the fourth online channel for Chinese people to communicate with each other, following email, bulletin board systems (BBS) and instant messaging tools such as QQ and MSN Messenger,” Bian Bingbin, President and Chief Career Consultant with CBP Career Consultants, told Interfax Monday. “Blogging is now a lifestyle habit for more and more Chinese white-collar workers, with a majority updating their blogs once every three days on average,” he said.

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Download The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online by David Teten and Scott Allen FREE!

I presented Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online for the second time, this time at the American Translators Association (ATA) ATA 46th Annual Conference in Seattle on Saturday. The presentation was well attended and well received. Among the members of audience where my friends, Beatriz Bonnet, president of Syntes Language Group in Denver and Christine Egwuonwu, senior project manager of Commgap in Salt Lake City. I also met Christine’s husband for the first time.

Two members of the audience who came to the front of the room to introduce themselves after my presentation really stood out: Sandra Alboum, owner of Alboum & Associates in Arlington and Natalia Jimenez, managing director of Eurologos in San Jose. Both of them noted my need for Italian-English and Italian-Spanish translators by looking closely at the screen grabs of my social networking software (SNS) profiles during the presentation and each of them came forward to recommend one. They’re either naturals at networking or quick studies!

Another member of the audience, Virginia Anderson of Canvas Dreams in Beaverton, Oregon, pointed out, during the customer relationship management (CRM) portion of the presentation, that her husband, David Anderson, had built ContacTracker, hosted CRM solution.

After the presentation, I had the pleasure of dining with ATA Translation Company Division (TCD) assistant administrator, Ellen Boyar, translation manager of Thomson Scientific in Philadelphia, past ATA TCD administrator Linda Gauthier, COO of BG Communications International in Montreal and Greg Churilov, president of Effective Translations in Buenos Aires. We talked about money, politics, religion and sex. We are now closer than ever. Remember, networking is about building relationships and building relationships is personal.

To top off a great networking weekend, on my way home, I met up with the same Southwest Airlines flight attendant I first met on my trip home from the ATA TCD 6th Annual Conference in Philadelphia where, coincidentally, I first presented Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online last April. I recognized her first and reintroduced myself. She remembered me, my book, Vacation Spanish, and the flight we were on when we first met.

On my flight to Seattle I had met a linguist, author and speaker, Don Richardson (who was also traveling to Seattle to speak,) who, as a Christian missionary in far flung places across the globe, has documented types of Christ woven into the languages and cultures of the peoples among whom he has lived and worked and has written a number of books on the subject. Don told me a couple of compelling stories that aroused my curiosity. I now look forward to reading one or more of his books. I hope to stay in touch with him and his lovely wife, Carol, who was traveling with him to give a solo singing performance in Seattle.

For those of you who missed my presentation, and for those of you who would like to review it, I’m sorry I didn’t consent to have it recorded on the DVD the ATA made of this year’s conference presentations. I promise I’ll do it next time. In the meantime, you can download Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online.ppt or read Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online, the first in a series of articles on the subject published in the ATA TCD newsletter (the second one is due out later this month.) I also recommend reading CustomerCentric Selling by Michael T. Bosworth, author of Solution Selling, and The Virtual Handshake by my good friend, online business networking guru, Scott Allen, and Never Eat Alone by master networker Keith Ferrazzi. See also: Blogger, Bloglines, Ecademy, FreeCRM.com, Hoovers, LinkedIn, openBC, Plaxo, Ryze, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, TypePad and WordPress.

Common Sense Advisory, Inc., an independent research and consulting firm, announces the launch of the Global Watchtowerâ„¢, a blog-like forum for sharing its commentary and assessment of globalization- or global business-related press releases and announcements.

The Global Watchtower™ contains entries from Don DePalma, author of the premier book on business globalization, “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing,” and Renato Beninatto, longtime language industry expert who is known as the go-to resource for translation and localization.

Visit Common Sense Advisory’s Global Watchtowerâ„¢ for commentary on the latest business globalization news or to submit a news item for consideration. Analysts review events, press releases, or issues – and assess their importance using the patented three-habañero scale. Visitors can add the Global Watchtowerâ„¢ to their RSS readers or feeds.

Source: Common Sense Advisory press release

My proposed presentation for the ATA 46th Annual Conference in Seattle, Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online, was accepted, and is scheduled for Saturday, November 12, 2005 3:30-5:00 p.m.

This is a repeat of the well-received presentation I gave at the 2005 ATA TCD Annual Conference in Philadelphia on Saturday, April 16, 2005 and the subject of a series of articles by the same title, the first of which was published in Volume 5, Issue 2 of the ATA TCD News.

My copy of The Culturally Customized Web Site by Nitish Singh and Arun Pereira arrived yesterday from the publisher (Elsevier). The price offered by the publisher when following the link from Nitish Singh’s homepage ($23.96) was lower than the price on Amazon.com which was list ($29.95) and the publisher shipped it gratis. It comes endorsed by John Yunker, author of Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies, who says it’s “a valuable tool for helping executives successfully localize their web site”.

By the way, I found out about this book thanks to Amazon.com’s personalized recommendations. Aside from buying books from Amazon.com, I’ve taken the time to click “I own it” under “RATE THIS ITEM” on the Amazon.com page describing each book I’ve purchased elsewhere. Doing this really put the “personalized” in my personalized recommendations.

Also, Don DePalma’s book, Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing is now available in paperback on Amazon.com for only $16.96 (list price for the paperback is $19.95, list for the now-out-of-print hardcover edition was $29.95).

For all those who hate the way their names are being mutilated as a result of the inadequacy of the currently available computer keyboards, a solution to such name mutilation is now in sight.

As from May, 2005, Konyin, the multilingual Computer keyboard would be on sale throughout the country. The keyboard contains not just the naira sign, but also all the alphabets of Nigerian languages.
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=3188850&Act=19

Speaking in Lagos, officials of Lancor Technologies, including the Managing Director, Mr. George Van-Lare and the CTO, Engineer Olukayode Oluwole, who is also the inventor of the keyboard says eight years of intensive research had produced various versions of the product with the present 4th edition being the final. It accommodates all Nigerian languages and not just those of the three big ethnic groups.

The keyboard is capable of typing tonal marks and ascents, diacritical marks and characters, of more than 400 Nigerian languages.

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The U.S. Hispanic economy’s surging demographics are putting pressure on a healthcare industry already plagued by a shortage of qualified workers, creating increased demand for Hispanic professionals from nurses and doctors to administrative, executive, and emergency personnel.

Already grappling with a rapidly aging U.S. population, as well as mergers and cutbacks, the healthcare industry has strained to keep up with overall nationwide needs, a situation which experts expect to continue. “The demand for qualified healthcare workers will continue to increase as the U.S. population ages,” says Rhonda Lipsey, vertical marketing manager and healthcare employment expert at CareerBuilder.com. “More than 300,000 healthcare jobs were created in 2004 and economists are projecting this trend will continue in 2005 with nurses, medical assistants, and radiology technicians as some of the top-recruited positions.”

But a 2004 report by the Sullivan Commission on Diversity in the Healthcare Workforce highlighted significant disparities in a variety of medical fields. The commission found that while Hispanics account for more than 12 percent of the U.S. population, they represented only 3.3 percent of physicians in 2002 and only 2 percent of registered nurses in 2000.

The commission and other experts say the shortage is translating into lower quality of care and higher rates of illness, disability, and premature death among minorities. The commission and others also note a link to marketplace competitiveness, with poor health outcomes for members of racial and ethnic minorities attributable to a lack of diversity in the health workforce, translating into a loss of productivity, avoidable absenteeism, and increased healthcare costs for businesses employing minorities.

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Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson on Wednesday hailed globalization and free trade as beneficial for all but insisted that national policies were needed to ensure social safeguards.

Being able to combine free trade with a competitive industry and at the same time maintaining and developing a secure safety net and a good education system, that is I think a challenge,” Persson said.

“If we manage to do so, then I think there are opportunities for everyone in globalization,” he told reporters in Stockholm after a meeting with the OECD’s Canadian Secretary-General Donald Johnston.

The two men discussed the program for the annual OECD ministerial meeting in Paris next week, to be led by Persson under the heading “Enabling Globalization”.

Persson’s attempt to put a more humane face on globalization – the trend toward market-driven free trade – after years of massive demonstrations around the world to protest of what many see as its ruthless nature.

The topic has been especially hot in Europe since the EU expansion last year, which sparked fears in many old member states of an influx of cheaper labour from the new, mainly Eastern European members.

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With more and more college graduates entering the “real world” each year, it’s becoming harder to stand out on resumes and applications. USF’s study abroad program gives students the opportunity to get an upper hand on the competition at an affordable price.

“In this global world and international market place, every employer or graduate school, professional school, everyone is looking to hire or to take into their graduate studies programs people with international dimension to their education,” said James D. Pulos, assistant director of study abroad. “In reality, having done an international program, short term, summer or full semester, makes a student more marketable. It puts them at the top of every employer’s list. It’s one of the most important things now — the diversity issue, having internationalization. It’s a way to actually quantify it on your transcript.

“It’s a wonderful experience to travel overseas and backpack through Europe, but you can’t necessarily show that to an employer. If you can show them a transcript, you can quantify it. Soon, people will be in the minority if they don’t have an international dimension to their education,” Pulos said

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As China moves into compliance with World Trade Organization (WTO) requirements, the freedom of international transport and supply companies to operate in the country has dramatically increased, catalyzing a host of changes. The principal effect is to bind China irreversibly into the global supply chain for industrial products.

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Hispanic students are the largest minority student group at [Weber State University], according to spring 2005 institutional data results. Hispanics are also the largest minority in Utah, comprising 27 percent of Ogden’s population.

Hispanic students have the highest dropout rate in Utah schools.

Jim Martin, a member of the Utah Achievement Gap Coalition, said Utah has one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation. The UAGC was founded in October 2004 to address the achievement gap, the many inequalities that exist in education among underrepresented groups, specifically students of color.

The UAGC’s position statement stresses that achievement gaps are a national and state problem requiring immediate attention. A National Assessment for Education Progress test results showed, students of color scored at least one grade level below white students on all measures of achievement and in all disciplines.

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The Vacation Spanish Blog was published yesterday. The URI is www.vacationspanish.com. Please feel free to add your comments.