It’s hard to tell now, but in the future, 2004 could be seen as one of the pivotal years in the history of Japanese cinema. This is not necessarily because of the quality of films released–and there were a number of great films–but because of hints of fundamental shifts in the industry and its relation to the global marketplace.

It is significant that the most successful film with Japanese actors in the domestic market this year was not even a Japanese-made film, but The Last Samurai. That was only one of a number of foreign-made films–most released in 2003 in the United States–that underlined the strong interest that exists in Japanese pop culture on a global scale

Heterogeneity and cultural border crossings can be a good thing, especially for a Japan that was long an exclusionary nation, but this trend is not exactly new. Independent filmmakers have been deconstructing the myth of Japanese homogeneity for over a decade…

What is different about the current internationalization is not just the watering down, the turning of cultural difference into commodities to consume, but–and this is probably the origin of those side effects–the fact it’s now taking place in the major studios. What these global institutional moves threaten to do is further distance the majors from the minors and further undermine an already unfairly hampered independent industry through the force of big capital, especially in television.

Read more

Italy has taken another step forward in fostering good relations with emerging economic superpower China via a new program for academic cooperation, Italian media reported on Wednesday.

The Marco Polo program, sponsored by Italy’s powerful industrial employers’ association Confindustria, sets up a system for “stable relations” between Chinese and Italian universities.

The agreement is the fruit of Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi’s trip to the oriental country earlier in the month, which was aimed at promoting economic and cultural ties between the countries.

Marco Polo will provide a platform for the management of joint research projects.

Offices in both countries will also be set up for the coordination of academic exchanges involving researchers and lecturers – all of which will be supported by intensive foreign language instruction programs.

Read more

IBMers sip spring water, wear suits and go on low-carb diets.

Workers at Lenovo, China’s biggest PC maker, favor fish head soup, open-collar shirts and smoking.

Lenovo on Dec. 7 agreed to buy Big Blue’s PC, laptop and notebook unit in a $1.75 billion deal. But in acquiring the unit — and 10,000 U.S. IBM (IBM) employees — Lenovo also is acquiring a very different corporate culture.

There’s been a growing number of Chinese giants buying key business units from Western firms.

Most analysts say such East-West marriages can work if parties address cultural or managerial issues quickly. And in a rapidly globalizing world, fusions between giants on opposite ends of the world may be the only way to go, they say.

Read more

John Yunker, author of Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies, makes a few predictions for the year ahead:

– Web Globalization Goes Mainstream
– Amazon.com Adds Spanish
– Apple Launches iTunes Korea
– The Global Gateway finds the “Sweet Spot”

Read more

Lexicon Marketing, developer and marketer of Inglés sin Barreras, a video-based English learning program, has increased its advertising investment from $12.56 to $75.00 million in little over a year, and is now challenging the venerable Procter & Gamble for the top [advertiser in the Hispanic market] position.

Read more

Total monies spent by the top-50 advertisers to reach the U.S. Hispanic market have grown more impressively than the overall market itself despite slowing in growth in recent years. From 2000-2004, dollars spent by the top-50 advertisers grew from $658.37 million to $1.23 billion, an 87 percent increase. The dramatic increase in advertising expenses serves as an indirect indicator of advertising investment satisfaction by existing advertisers.

Read more

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s Hispanic Committee, comprising executives from companies such as Univision and Yahoo!, estimates that U.S. online advertising to Hispanics will reach $75 million this year, up 67 percent from 2003. Advertisers spent just $10 million in 2002, the bureau estimates.

Committee Chairman Peter Blacker, vice-president of multicultural and international advertising for AOL Media Networks, sees strong growth in 2005 as well. “I think the market is trending to well above $100 million for next year,” he says. “We’re seeing in our space right now sort of the go-go years of the ’90s.”

A strong selling point is the number of Hispanics who are going online at home. According to the 2004 AOL/RoperASW U.S. Hispanic Cyberstudy, 20 percent of U.S. Hispanic Internet users have been online at home for less than six months, compared with just 6 percent of general at-home Internet users. A separate report by Synovate predicts that by 2010, 62 percent of U.S. Hispanics will have access to the Internet at home – up from 45 percent this year.

Besides being a fast-growing Internet market, Hispanics also are spending slightly more time online than the general market. A 2003 study by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy determined that Hispanics spend 11.6 hours per week online, compared with 11.0 hours among non-Hispanics. The difference is greater at home, where Hispanics spend 9.8 hours per week online while non-Hispanics spend just 8.1 hours on the Internet, the study found.

Read more

MTV Tuesday announced plans to add three new multicultural TV channels aimed at “super-serving” specific ethnic populations in the U.S.

MTV said its research shows ethnic populations in the U.S. are currently: “underserved by the media and there is a great appetite for local language channels amongst these groups. Many of these ethnic groups prefer speaking their home language, and are hungry for music and culture from their country of origin.” Additional ethnic channels are expected to follow.

Read more

Double-digit gains in Hispanic advertising expenditures were made in all media, but television continues to garner the majority of all ad dollars. Television ad spending accounted for more than 64 percent of all expenditures in 2004. Nearly all media examined are predicted to exhibit double digit growth through at least 2007.

Read more

Funding cuts and changes in education policies have led to a sharp reduction in the number of Americans studying foreign languages at the same time the government and business are demanding more employees with language skills.

[The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages] quoted the American Council on Education as saying overall foreign language enrollment in U.S. higher education fell from16 percent of students 1960 to 8 percent in 2002.

“Fewer than 1 percent of American graduate students are studying languages deemed by the federal government to be critical to national security,” said Keith Cothrun, a German teacher and ACTFL president, at a briefing at the National Press Club.

A 2002 survey by Health Companies International, a research firm, showed that Americans business executives had the lowest average number of languages spoken – 1.4. In the Netherlands, that number was 3.9, followed by Sweden at 3.4 and Brazil at 2.9. Just above the United States at the bottom of the list of 18 countries were three other English-speaking countries: the United Kingdom (1.5), New Zealand (1.6) and Canada (1.8).

The U.S. government needs 34,000 employees with foreign language skills in 80 agencies, according to ACTFL. A 2002 Government Accountability Office study found that the Army had serious shortfalls of translators and interpreters in five of six critical languages – Arabic, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Persian-Farsi and Russian.

Web sites for the Transportation Security Administration, Homeland Security Department and a government-wide job site list vacancies in those categories that pay from $80,000 to $90,000 per year.

Read more

For the first time in history, Muslims are building large and growing minorities across the secular Western world–nowhere more visibly than in Western Europe, where their numbers have more than doubled in the past two decades. The impact is unfolding from Amsterdam to Paris to Madrid, as Muslims struggle — with words, votes and sometimes violence–to stake out their place in adopted societies.

Disproportionately young, poor and unemployed, they seek greater recognition and an Islam that fits their lives. Just as Egypt, Pakistan and Iran are witnessing the debate over the shape of Islam today, Europe is emerging as the battleground of tomorrow.

By midcentury, at least one in five Europeans will be Muslim. That change is unlike other waves of immigration because it poses a more essential challenge: defining a modern Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization. The West must decide how its laws and values will shape and be shaped by Islam.

For Europe, as well as the United States, the question is not which civilization, Western or Islamic, will prevail, but which of Islam’s many strands will dominate. Will it be compatible with Western values or will it reject them?

Read more

Paciano Pedro, a new immigrant from Mexico, has a severe language problem. Not only does he not speak English – he can barely speak Spanish.

The South Bronx man is fluent only in Otomi, an ancient, indigenous language spoken in remote mountainous villages in the southern Mexican state of Veracruz.

Pedro’s face may blend into New York’s fastest-growing Latino population, but he is part of a new wave of Mexicans who speak only Mixtec, Nahuatl or Otomi.

Mexican Consulate officials estimate that 40,000 non-Spanish-speaking Mexicans have moved to the city in recent years to work at car washes, corner markets and restaurant kitchens.

The majority of them are fluent in Mixtec, said Gaspar Orozco, the Mexican consul for community affairs.

Read more

The last two days have seen the release of not just one but two online software translation portals. Yesterday Translate.org.za announced their system Pootle and on the same day Ubuntu Linux announced its Rosetta. Both allow registered users to translate PO files for a range of open source software.

Read more

Emmy Award Winning TM Systems, developers of the industry’s only “end to end” language translation, dubbing and subtitling system, has added MTV Networks Latin America, headquartered in Miami Beach, Florida, to its growing list of international language localization users.

The TM Systems technology will offer MTV Networks Latin America the ability to subtitle all of its broadcast material, to and from any language, with the efficiency of a digital, fully integrated system that brings a greater flexibility, increased continuity, expedited completion time and greater overall accuracy.

Read more

The issue of Western misperception of Arabs and Muslims was the subject of a singularly realistic debate this week at the headquarters of the Arab League.

Meeting under the title, “Euro-Arab Dialogue: The image of Arab-Islamic Culture in European History Books”, representatives of the Arab League, UNESCO, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (ALECSO), the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (IESCO) and the Council of Europe debated the misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims in European countries. The international conference concluded that European culture contained an “erroneous image, if not images”, not just of Arabs and Muslims, but also of Arab culture, Muslim civilisation, and above all, of Islam as a faith.

Read more