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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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English remains the language of choice among the children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants, a new analysis of census data shows.

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Bangalore, the capital of India’s technology sector, has become one of the world’s fastest growing software hubs, offering foreign companies a winning formula comprised of a large number of skilled software engineers at a very cheap price. The combination of quantity, quality and low cost is so attractive that Israeli companies should start preparing themselves for a reality in which it won’t be economical anymore to keep some of their activities in Israel.

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Big laughs erupted in Buenos Aires, as moviegoers heard a local radio sportscaster’s voice dubbed in as one of the animated characters in “The Incredibles,” the latest Disney/Pixar hit, reports Wailin Wong in a Dow Jones Newswires dispatch. The locally familiar voice was that of Matias Martin, in the role of “the villainous Syndrome,” as voiced by Jason Lee “in the original version.” Not only did Sr. Martin lend his well-recognized sportscaster’s pipes to the part, but also “some of his trademark sports expressions and inside jokes about co-hosts.” He actually was just one of a number of local actors, singers and other celebrities cast in the Argentine version of the film, and “throwing round local slang and referencing Buenos Aires locations.”

This extra Argentine effort was a first for Disney, which “began dubbing specific versions of its films for Mexico, its fifth largest market,” only two years ago. The studio also began dubbing “two additional versions in ‘neutral’ Spanish, one for Central America — including Colombia, Venezuela and Peru — and another for the Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Uruaguay, Paraguay and Chile.”

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Hat tip: Going Global

Raising the level of internationalization of universities is not merely the current consensus among schools; it has also become one of the standards by which colleges are assessed, to the exclusion of all other subjects. More and more schools and departments are now teaching specialized courses in English. But many students are calling foul. They feel that not only does this approach do nothing to increase their English proficiency; it may also prevent them from mastering professional knowledge. It is, they claim, a case of putting the cart before the horse.

To keep pace with “globalization”, and to attract foreign students at the same time, in recent years the [Taiwanese] Ministry of Education has encouraged and assisted universities to teach more courses in English.

Hispanic attitudes survey probes the differences between Hispanics who consider themselves white and those who say they are of some other race.

Hispanics who view themselves as white are more likely to be better educated, earn more, register to vote and vote Republican…

Regional differences

…in California, only 42 percent of U.S.-born Mexican-Americans identified themselves as white, compared with 63 percent of their ethnic counterparts in Texas.

For instance, 81 percent of Puerto Ricans living on the island identified themselves as white in the 2000 census, while only 46 percent of those living on the U.S. mainland did so. And among Cubans, those living in Florida were much more likely to say they were white than those living in California.

Latin American culture

In many Latin American countries, race is a flexible concept and can change with a person’s status in society. Historical and contemporary evidence shows that a Latin American strain of racism favors lighter-skinned over darker-skinned people, but as an old Caribbean proverb says, “Money bleaches.”

U.S. Hispanics

In the United States, Hispanics are an ethnic group made up of people of different races, often mixed, and from a variety of ancestral homelands. In the 2000 census, they mainly selected two racial categories to describe themselves. Forty-eight percent identified themselves as white, and 42 percent chose “some other race.”

Hispanics who perceive themselves as white appear to feel that their place in American society is more secure, the report found.

…Hispanics who said they were white were more likely to describe themselves as American than those who said they were of some other race.

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SelectWisely has expanded its food translation card offerings to address the needs of travelers who are lactose intolerant. Visitors to their Web site can create a card specific to their travel plans. Each wallet-size laminated card translates the phrases ,“I am allergic to milk and all milk products”; and “Does this food contain milk or any milk products?”, into any of 12 different languages, including both forms of Chinese, Portuguese and Greek

SelectWisely offers cards in:
– 12 different languages. (French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, German, Russian, Polish, 2 forms of Chinese, 2 forms of Portuguese and English)
– 40 different foods. (Meat, fish, shellfish, pork, poultry, etc., as well as common allergy-producing foods such as nuts, milk, shellfish, and eggs)
– 7 different types of cards. (Single language and multiple languages/foods per card)

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Another example is the development of instantaneous language translation devices, which Kurzweil predicted will be common on cellular telephones by the end of the decade.

“Within a few years, we will be able to talk to anyone, regardless of language,” he said.

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Hat tip: Language Technology Business

It took a chance online encounter between a software engineer from Shanghai and a teacher in a remote province of China to start shaking up the power balance between the people and the government of the world’s most populous nation.

In August 2002, Isaac Mao, who worked at the Shanghai office of the chip maker Intel, was one of only a handful of people in China who had heard the word “blog”. A regular web surfer, he was fascinated by the freedom these online journals gave to ordinary people to publish both their own and their readers’ views online.

Surfing the US website blogger.com, Mao was thrilled to find Zheng Yunsheng, a teacher at a technical school in Fujian province. He left a message on Zheng’s blog, and two weeks later Mao and Zheng started CNBlog.org, China’s first online discussion forum about blogging technology and culture.

They soon gathered a small but devoted group of participants, many of whom went on to develop the technology that makes blogging possible for China’s half-a-million bloggers.

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Hat tip: Going Global

Churchill quipped that the US and the UK were two countries divided by a common language. Despite a two-way stream of mass media products and mutual exchanges, this divide is still a constant operational issue for readers, writers and translators.

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After wooing North America, Europe and South Africa, Bollywood stars are now headed for Hong Kong for the concert that is seen as an important milestone in internationalization of Bollywood.

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