Why is the English spoken by Maine lobstermen so different from that spoken by cowboys in Texas?
Does Spanish pose a threat to English as the dominant language in America? And what on earth do yins, wickety wack, ayuh, catty whompus, and stomping it clean mean? Robert MacNeil travels cross-country to answer these questions and examine the dynamic state of American English – a language rich with regional variety, strong global impact and cultural controversy.

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By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

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Hat tip: Smart Mobs

Two Providence councilmen want to make it easier for renters and for residents who don’t speak English to be involved in government.

They would require city notices and postings to be multilingual and for [interpreters] to be available at meetings.

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This year has been a boom one for Spanish-language media in the United States, which has seen the birth of new publications as well as mergers and purchases involving large corporations.

Even as the circulation of English-language newspapers continues to decline slightly, the Spanish print media are thriving, both in number and in dollar figures.

According to the magazine Hispanic Business, between 2000 and 2003, the number of U.S. Hispanic publications grew 14.2 percent, spurred in part by the 2000 census’ revelation that the nation’s 38 million Hispanics now constitute its largest minority.

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A North Texas food distributor that ships grocers imported products from south of the border said it plans to open several club stores in Dallas and Fort Worth.

Dallas-based La Familia Distributors plans to expand its 12-state distribution by opening six stores that will offer products and groceries such as candies, laundry detergents, pastries and drinks from Mexico. The plan will put La Familia into retailing for the first time.

A 2000 Census report by the North Central Texas Council of Governments stated that Hispanics make up 21 percent of the population in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

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The leading 5 DMAs accounted for slightly more than 51 percent of all Hispanic advertising expenditures. The top-five DMAs have shown strong and consistent growth over the past five years. Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Houston, and Chicago have had a combined media revenue growth of 24 percent. The Chicago DMA is expected to lead the way with over the next few years with an anticipated ad spending growth rate of more than 50 percent. Los Angeles and Houston will not be far behind however, with 40-plus percentage increases expected in the coming years.

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The Casio English-Chinese Translation Competition announced prize winners in its contest late last month but, surprisingly, no first prize was awarded. The judging panel said that none of the entries submitted was worthy of the honor of winning the top prize… Possibly even more astonishing was that second prize went to a 39-year-old Singaporean translator, Shaun Yeo… Yeo’s win distressingly reflects that the supply of qualified young translators is dwindling in China even as the country’s demand for translators is on the rise. According to Shanghai Translation Publishing House, the translation industry has witnessed an upsurge in the number of companies, with more than 3,000 operating on the Chinese mainland. The number could be closer to 10,000, as many small companies registered as consultancies actually conduct translations. However, the translator’s craft has suffered from a lack of advanced translation professionals. Although there are 60,000 professional translators and interpreters throughout the country, and at least 500,000 people engaged in translation work, it still doesn’t meet demand. By 2005, there will be a 20 billion yuan (US$2.41 billion) translation market in China, experts say.

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Marketing Sherpa interviews John Yunker:

We asked Yunker for three basic steps you can take to begin globalizing your site this year.

-> Step #1. Start small

A. List your strategic markets for next five years

Once you have a basic list, register domain names in those countries so you don’t lose out on them, even if you don’t plan to use them immediately.

B. Pick a single country to begin

Get your feet wet by branching out into one additional market so you can fully understand the details of globalization before launching a full effort.

C. Be prepared to support your new local site

“The minute you do launch a local Web site, you will be expected to support it, so you’ll need some people who have language skills that can support questions that come in via email or by phone,” says Yunker.

Customers understand that you may not offer the same services that you offer in your local market, but you have to manage their expectations, he says. If you can’t offer phone support in the local language, make that clear, and offer alternatives.

D. Research the culture

Okay, this should be obvious, but don’t forget to be sensitive to local culture

E. English language or not?

Many companies make the mistake of thinking the whole world (or all business executives) speaks English, but in truth it depends on your market segment.

-> Step #2. Keep your site’s bandwidth low

Be aware of the bandwidth requirements of the countries to which you’re reaching out. Limit graphics and avoid animation. This means little or no Flash or rich media.

-> Step #3. Rethink your “global gateway” start page

Note: The sweet spot for your global gateway icon is in the upper right-hand corner of each page a new visitor might enter your site on.

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Hat tip: Going Global

The Defense Logistics Information Services recently issued a long anticipated “improved multilingual logistics tool” on compact disc and on the Web.

The NATO Codification System, which is based on the Federal Catalog System, includes standard dictionaries for naming, classification and description of materiel with data exchanged between nations in a predominantly “coded” format. “Decoding” occurs at the receiving nation using national translation tables. Thus the NCS becomes a “common language” for logistics within NATO and the many other nations using this system.

English and French have long served as NATO’s two official languages, but DLIS technicians have worked with the national cataloging centers of 11 other nations to publish the NCS classification and naming standards in 12 languages.
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The NATO Multilingual Supply Classification Handbook and the NATO Multilingual Item Name Directory are published on CD-ROM by DLIS as the “Multilingual Allied Codification Publication 2 and 3 (ACodP-2/3).” The disc offers information in Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian and Spanish. Users can select the language in which they want to view the data and navigate easily between languages.

Recent software enhancements (using eXtrect software) will allow the display of virtually any characters. Using this software, Korean data will be included on the disc for the first time beginning with the April 2005 edition. Plans are underway to incorporate many other languages into this product in the future. In early 2005, the information on the compact disc will also be made available on a newly established NATO-sponsored Web site, http://www.acodp2-3.com/.

The product is available to military, government and private industry customers around the world and is published semi-annually during April and October. This data can be a useful tool for naming and classifying supply items in accordance with the NCS. The multilingual disc can be ordered through a military publications account, a Foreign Military Sales case or by direct purchase from DLIS.

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Vasont Systems, a provider of
content management software and data services, today introduced a new
integration between the Vasont Content Management System and Microsoft Word.
Vasont is a single-source content management system that enables organizations
to store their multilingual content once for multi-channel delivery. Using
the Vasont Universal Integrator (VUI) extension, this integration enables
users to:

— Access Vasont directly from the Microsoft Word interface, so that
they can take advantage of Vasont’s versioning, advanced search, and
workflow capabilities to streamline the editorial process;

— Mix-and-match Microsoft Word content with XML content already stored
in Vasont to create new documents; and

— Convert Microsoft Word-authored documents to XML for use across an
entire enterprise, while still maintaining a link to the source
document.

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Within 10 years, no one on the planet will confuse globalization with Americanization. That’s because several new superpowers are rising across the landscape, offering distinctively different faces to the often-demonized globalization process. Here’s a quick preview.

The European Union will emerge as a financial superpower based on the rising importance of the euro as a global reserve currency that competes with our dollar. China is well on its way to emerging as the manufacturing superpower of the global economy, with design superpower Japan acting as its natural mentor. Then there’s India, the information technology superpower, Brazil, the agricultural superpower, and Russia, the natural gas superpower for the impending hydrogen age.

All of these rising powers will inevitably remake the face of globalization, giving it a host of features not easily recognized as American…

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You’ve no doubt heard the expression, “something was lost in the translation.” One local nonprofit tries to make sure that does not happen, especially during difficult situations.

News 8 Austin’s Paul Brown spoke with Esther Diaz, the president of the Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association.

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These days, every employee here gets a birthday gift, something a multinational company might be expected to do in this age of feel-good corporate management.

The problem is that people in China do not traditionally celebrate birthdays.

But that is changing. And so is Lenovo. It is trying to become a global company with its purchase of I.B.M’s personal computer business for $1.75 billion, and handing out birthday cakes is just part of the process of evolving into a multinational corporation.

To further globalize the company, however, Lenovo will do something even bolder: it will move its headquarters to Armonk, N.Y., where I.B.M. is based, and essentially hand over management of what will become the world’s third-largest computer maker, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard, to a group of senior I.B.M. executives.

American multinational companies outsource manufacturing to China. Why can’t a Chinese company outsource management to the United States?

Preparations are already under way in Beijing. For the last few months, all vice presidents have been required to study English for at least one hour a day. The chairman says he has read books about Bill Gates and Andrew Grove. And the chief executive of Lenovo has agreed to give up day-to-day management of the company to assume the role of chairman.

Lenovo’s challenge will be to meld radically different corporate cultures.

“Neither culture should be the de facto culture,” said Martin Gilliland, an analyst at Gartner Research. “They have to start a new one. Can they develop a new Lenovo business culture? That’s one of the keys to success.”

And the new language for the company is English, company officials say.

Lenovo officials say they are studying American business history, and the chief executive lists The Harvard Business Review as part of his regular reading.

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Hat tip: Going Global

Blogs, short for Web logs, were the talk of the Net in 2004, so much so tha Merriam-Webster Online named “blog” 2004’s word of the year, based on the number of times it was looked up on the company’s online dictionary.

In Europe and the United States, the market for blogging software is splintered, and no company has a dominant position. But in South Korea, SK Communications’ Cyworld unit has turned a kind of souped-up, community-oriented blogging software into a runaway hit called Cyworld.

Eleven million South Koreans now have a Cyworld “mini-hompy,” or mini home page. This is nearly a quarter of the overall population and a third of the country’s online population. SK Comunications says that about 79 percent of Cyworld users are in their 20s or 30s. In November, the Cyworld Web site attracted 16.8 million unique visits, according to KoreanClick, a research concern, which also estimated that 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s were members of Cyworld.

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Hat tips: Smart Mobs

In many parts of Latin America, resistance to cultural domination by the United States is often synonymous with a reluctance to learn or speak English. But here, where Salvador Allende was once a beacon for the left, the current Socialist-led national government has begun a sweeping effort to make this country bilingual.

Chile already has the most open, market-friendly economy in Latin America, and the language plan is seen as advancing that process.

The initial phase of the 18-month-old program, officially known as “English Opens Doors,” calls for all Chilean elementary and high school students to be able to pass a standardized listening and reading test a decade from now. But the more ambitious long-term goal is to make all 15 million of Chile’s people fluent in English within a generation.

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Hat tip: Going Global