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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By outward investment appearances, the purchase by Spanish financial giant BBVA of Texas-based Laredo National Bancshares for $850 million this year was a typical bank acquisition.

Financially, the deal weighed in at about three times book value and 16 times earnings. But strategically the transaction represented much more. With the purchase, BBVA gained 35 branches in South Texas and 110,000 new customers – more than 93,000 of whom are Hispanic. And that connection to a historically under-served market, which experts project will have growing influence and affluence, was just the latest in a string of deals by global financial giants all seeking to get a foothold in the market.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a history of using alternatives to mainstream media to get his message out – but he’s now breaking new ground by writing a monthly column for exclusive distribution by ethnic news organizations.

The column is translated into multiple languages by New California Media, an association of more than 700 ethnic news outlets that is holding its sixth annual awards banquet in Sacramento tonight.

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The lender is Hipotecaria Nacional, one of several Mexican mortgage firms that have followed millions of workers across the border.

Industry officials say immigrants’ dollars might help finance the flourishing Mexican mortgage market and provide them with a place back home. It is also a new way for Mexico to funnel part of the $13 billion yearly flow of remittances into tangible investments.

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“Globalization is the environment in which we live. We’ve got one world. Get used to it. Make the most of it. Debating globalization? It’s like asking fish to debate the merits of living in the sea,” McNamee writes in his new book, The New Normal.

The United States may be the most powerful country in the world, but we can’t even control the value of our currency, much less the ebb and flow of world trade. And the truth is, the pain of globalization has been relatively small in comparison to the benefits,” McNamee writes.

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A Duke University expert on Asian film says that global flow in the film industry has meant an increase in the ‘Asianization’ of Hollywood films to match the long-standing influence of Holywood films on Asia.

Professor Leo Ching, chair of the Asian and African Languages and Literature Department, says that remakes of Asian films that are big hits in the United States often reflect the influence of Hollywood on Asian directors.

“Hollywood is not being taken over by Asian cinema. In fact, it’s the reverse. It only works because of the Hollywoodization of Asian cinema,” he says.

After all, says Ching, Asian audiences have been viewing U.S. films for 20 to 30 years and have acquired a taste for them. Seventy-eight percent of the Thailand box office is Hollywood films. It’s an astonishing 65 percent of the box office in Japan.

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C’est mon opinion, et je la partage.

It’s not often you see French in American newspapers, unless it’s a conservative rail against our longtime ally France. Little of that would be printable in a family newspaper, though.

But what about, “nom de guerre”? Do you know what it means?

Reader John Appeldorn of Akron called recently after an article involving Yasser Arafat referred to him as Abu Ammar, his “nom de guerre.”

Appeldorn suggested the Akron Beacon Journal stick to words and phrases that regular people can understand. He had seen the phrase before in the paper and always wondered what it meant.

Indeed. A close reader of the Beacon Journal would have seen that French phrase three times in the past year and 57 times in the last 20 years. It’s been used in a variety of ways, but never has it been defined.

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In the current Chinese cyberspace, bloggers may not be as loud as their American counterparts. But they are potentially certainly no less subversive to the dominant paradigm. Hope will be born from their whispers.

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In the field of law, Japan certainly cannot yet be said to be sufficiently open vis-a-vis other countries. In order to improve this situation, a law-and-ordinance translation group set up within the government’s Office for Promotion of Justice System Reform has unveiled a project to translate legislation into English, with priority given to basic laws such as the Civil Code.

At present, government ministries and agencies and private organizations engage in the translation of some legislation, but separately and without any consistency. The working group proposes, through government involvement, to formulate and unify the basic rules of translation, such as what terms and expressions should be used, to ensure that translations are both accurate and easy to understand.

The translation of laws and ordinances into foreign languages would facilitate international business and promote investment by foreign companies. It would also help support the establishment of legal systems in developing countries, especially those in Asia, introduce and increase knowledge of Japanese legislation in other countries, and familiarize foreign residents with life in Japan.

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I hate to be the bearer of good news, because only pessimists are regarded as intellectually serious, but we’re in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history. Last week, the World Bank released a report showing that global growth “accelerated sharply” this year to a rate of about 4 percent.

Best of all, the poorer nations are leading the way. Some rich countries, like the United States and Japan, are doing well, but the developing world is leading this economic surge. Developing countries are seeing their economies expand by 6.1 percent this year – an unprecedented rate – and, even if you take China, India and Russia out of the equation, developing world growth is still around 5 percent. As even the cautious folks at the World Bank note, all developing regions are growing faster this decade than they did in the 1980s ‘and ’90s

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