Mandarin Mashup May 17, 2012
- Siri, Why Don't You Speak Spanish? - Creativity
Even though Siri was born in California, a state where more than one-third of the population is Hispanic or Latino, Apple's voice-activated personal assistant doesn't speak Spanish.
With Siri its major selling point, the iPhone 4S has flown off the shelves, despite running the risk of alienating the U.S. ethnic group most gaga for smartphones: Hispanics, who are more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to own them.
Even so, some think Apple stumbled in not including a Spanish-language Siri when it launched in October.
"I have several friends who purchased iPhones for family members and then returned them because Siri doesn't speak Spanish," said one Hispanic media exec. "At first they thought the phone was broken. Then they said, 'Siri es una estupida.' "
And though Siri has starred in Apple's ads for iPhones in the U.S., she can't be part of its sell in China because she also doesn't speak Mandarin -- the No. 1 language by volume of speakers.
That doesn't seem to be hurting iPhone's popularity there, though. Apple grossed more than $10 billion in Asia-Pacific in the first quarter, second only to the Americas $13 billion. Apple earned $8.8 billion in Europe in the first quarter.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to English, Siri speaks German, Japanese, French and even celebrity. ("Siri, remind me to put the gazpacho on ice.") Apple has said that additional languages, including Chinese, Korean, Italian and Spanish, are on the way this year.
"Apple has a roadmap and has to get all the bugs out," said Steven Wolfe Pereira, exec VP at MediaVest and managing director of its multicultural unit, MV42.
Apple has long used software like Siri to make its devices more appealing. For example, iTunes drove rabid demand for iPods. Similarly, iTunes was available in the U.S. first, then Europe and then elsewhere worldwide.
- Tourism building on World Cup success - Independent Online
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The dolphins at uShaka Marine World make the venue one of Durban's top tourism draws. Picture: Puri Devjee
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Growing up in Venda, Happiness Ndlovu dreamt of becoming an air hostess and travelling the world.
Her dream of taking to the skies didn't quite materialise, but her unusual career path has exposed her to the world in a way she would never have imagined.
After moving to Joburg in 1994, Happiness started work at a Chinese furniture supplier in 1996. When she battled to communicate with Chinese suppliers, who spoke little or no English, she taught herself to speak Mandarin.
It is a skill that landed her a job as a specialist tour guide, escorting Chinese tourists – while speaking to them fluently in their own language – around Gauteng, North West and Mpumalanga. For tour operator Tourvest, Happiness is heaven-sent.
She is just one of many thousands of people who work in the tourism industry – ordinary people with extraordinary abilities, who are behind the success of SA's 2011 international tourism statistics, released this month by Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk in Parliament.
After a record-breaking year in 2010, when the World Cup helped to achieve growth of 15.1 percent and tourist arrivals reached 8.1 million, the industry managed to achieve further growth last year, as tourist arrivals grew by 3.3 percent to 8.3 million.
Cultural tourism is a major drawcard for visitors from all over the world, but Tourism SA has identified emerging markets as key drivers of SA's crucial tourism sector. India and China have led the Asian drive to enjoy the best of what SA has to offer.
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And if the nearly 310 000 tourists who travelled here specifically for the World Cup are excluded from last year's figures, growth in 2011 was 7.4 percent, substantially above the global average of 4.4 percent.
After the highs of 2010, the challenge for the tourism industry was to ensure that SA remained top of mind in a tough economic climate and an increasingly competitive marketplace. The tourist arrival figures prove that our industry made the enhanced global awareness of SA count last year.
For SA Tourism, it is important now to analyse what is happening globally in our key markets, to build on successful campaigns and to sustain the growth we've had in important new markets such as China, India, Brazil and regional Africa.
While North America and Europe remain SA's major source of long-haul tourists, what really drove growth last year were increases out of Asia (14.6 percent) and Africa (6.9 percent).
Personal
The economic powerhouses of India and China drove Asian growth, with growth of 26 percent and 24 percent respectively, proof that our decision to increase our focus on emerging markets is paying off.
What we need now are the skills and the ability to cater for these markets, their languages, their dietary requirements and their tourist preferences. We need more people like Happiness.
Being more aware of the dietary and tourist preferences of our visitors does not apply only to the Chinese; it is important for several of our growing markets, including India, which is why we are working with the restaurant industry to better cater for vegetarian travellers.
It is these soft, personal touches that will result in SA becoming an increasingly welcoming and popular destination.
The economic crisis in Europe led to a decline in the tourist numbers in many of our core European markets, although Germany bucked this trend and grew by close to 10 percent for the second year in a row.
Taking heed of global travel trends, which show that travellers are seeking to engage destinations on a more personal and emotional level, our German office launched campaigns highlighting SA's lifestyle attractions.
They worked with interesting local personalities, such as celebrity chef Reuben Riffel and fashion designer Bongiwe Walaza, to tell their SA stories and interact directly with the target audience. Along with strong media and trade partnerships, this translated into the growth we enjoyed last year.
Our second-biggest long-haul market, the US, also recorded growth last year, of 1.9 percent, remarkable given that the US economy is still underperforming, and on top of the 22.6 percent increase in tourist arrivals in 2010, owing to huge interest from the US in the World Cup.
Series
Last year, SA hosted several popular US television shows, including Jeopardy!, The Bachelor and Real Housewives of Atlanta, further fuelling interest in the country.
The broadcast of the first of a six-part series of Jeopardy! episodes featuring SA attracted 9 million viewers.
The next day saw the most traffic ever to the US SA Tourism website as we used innovative ways to market our destination.
Regional Africa continues to power tourism growth to SA, and we are extremely happy to have received R218 million from the national government over the next three years to expand our work in regional Africa.
We will open five new offices on the continent in the next five years, the first of which is already open in Angola, and Nigeria (which had growth of 37.5 percent last year) will follow in this financial year.
There is no doubt the world and the travel experience is changing.
As a tourism industry, we need to stay ahead of these changes. Happiness has, and the rest of our tourism industry undoubtedly will, too. - Sunday Tribune
- English the preferred language for world business - poll - MoneyControl.com
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Like this story, share it with millions of investors on M3English the preferred language for world business - poll
Workers whose jobs require them to interact with people in foreign countries say that English is the dominant language of business, according to a new poll
Workers whose jobs require them to interact with people in foreign countries say that English is the dominant language of business, according to a new poll.
More than one quarter of employees in 26 countries around the world told an Ipsos poll that their jobs involve dealing with people in other countries. And of those, two-thirds said that English is the language they use most often.
Workers in India, Singapore and Saudi Arabia were the most likely to say their jobs involved interacting with people in other countries, with 59%, 55% and 50% saying so, respectively.
But only 9% in Japan and 13% in Russia said their work required communication outside the country.
"The most revealing aspect of this survey is how English has emerged as the default language for business around the world," said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs which conducted the poll for Reuters.
The survey of 16,344 employed adults in 26 countries showed that 67%, or just over two-thirds, of workers who deal with people beyond their borders said English was the language used most often, with Spanish a very distant second at five percent.
Nearly as many, 61%, said the language used for such interactions was different from their native one.
Bricker said the findings suggest "that all those in the English-speaking world who suggested that our children should learn Mandarin or Japanese to have successful careers were beaten to the punch by the Chinese, in particular, learning English first."
While more than three quarters of people in North America said they used English most often to communicate with those in other countries, 63% in China said the same thing. The same was true for France.
More than two thirds of workers in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Africa also defaulted to English.
In Latin America only one-third said English was most common when dealing with people in other countries. In Argentina and Mexico the choice was Spanish, in Brazil, Portuguese.
The survey showed that people with higher levels of income or education were among the most likely to say English was most commonly used for foreign business relationships.
Gender and age had no bearing on the dominant language for conducting business.
Countries surveyed included Indonesia, Turkey, the United States, Sweden, Great Britain, Spain, Canada and Italy among others.
- As China's Role in the World Change, So Does Mandarin's Role in China - Atlantic Online The Chinese national identity has long been tied up with its language, for natives and foreigners alike.
A Beijing woman looks at a poster promoting the use of Mandarin and Chinese characters. It reads, "The country promotes Mandarin and pushes to standardize Chinese characters." (Reuters)
There's an experience common to many first-time visitors to China, who often recount it with surprise, delight, and a sense of discovering something uniquely Chinese. It happens when they utter their first sentence in mandarin to a Chinese stranger -- a taxi driver, a watermelon vendor, or an old man practicing water calligraphy in the park -- and see the person's face instantly light up in amazement. That amazement might turn to reverence if the speaker can demonstrate even a shaky comfort with the language. Waiguoren -- foreigners -- are no longer a rare sight in many parts of this briskly modernizing country, and with the worldwide boom in studying Chinese, an increasing number of them bring language skills. While the novelty is wearing off, Chinese continue to be fascinated by foreigners able to speak their mother tongue. It's a fun moment of cross-cultural bonding, but it's also a product of China's complicated relationship with its own language, which for centuries has been tied up with its national identity. As China and its place in the world are changing, so is the meaning of the Chinese language for natives and foreigners alike.
Most recently, this fascination manifested in Chinese web user's reactions to (and obsessive viewing of) a viral Internet video, in which a young half-Caucasian, half-Asian American impersonates 12 different characters, among them a Beijinger, a Hong Kong Chinese, a Taiwanese, a New Yorker, an African American, and a score of non-Chinese foreigners speaking English with exaggerated native accents. His immaculate Chinese and jarringly precise grasp of the slangs, accents, and subtleties in the language's regional variations amazed his Chinese audience. "What are you trying to do?" Some users, pinching a line from his skit, asked on Weibo, where the video, which has over 5 million views on Youku, has been forwarded more than 435,000 times.
The Chinese language has long been a point of pride for its people, a sense that often comes through when they tell foreigners, smilingly, that Chinese is too hard to learn as a second language. They're telling the truth, which they have lived themselves through years of hunching over their desks in school, scribbling thousands of characters and memorizing Chengyu, special four-character Chinese aphorisms that gives one's speech a cultivated air. For foreigners, learning Chinese can require even more fortitude and patience, a subject eloquently explained in this essay famous among Chinese learners, "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard." The author, an English-speaker struggling to learn Chinese, posits that native speakers "generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes"
Exploring the growth of a massive economy See full coverageA deeper reason for the extraordinary pride that Chinese people take in their language lies in their view of it as a symbol of the nation's glorious history and blooming civilization. Chinese is one of the oldest known writings in the world, inscribed on animal bones that date back to 4,500 years ago, possibly earlier. It is one of the only logographic languages still widely used in the world, a writing system of pictorial symbols, each intended to look like the thing or idea it stands for. The language's consistent structural principles allow the modern descendants to converse directly with their distant ancestors, and create a remarkable sense of historical continuity that smoothes over the wrinkles of wars and dynasties. At any point in history, it has also been a powerful unifying force, tightly weaving ethnic groups under the rule of the empire and a common national identity. To neighboring countries that admired the civilization of the Middle Kingdom, the langauge was a form of soft power that they absorbed, incorporating Chinese into their own languages. Modern Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese all contain some linguistic traces of China's cultural influence.
Recent history, however, complicates Chinese people's relationship with their language. After repeated defeats by foreigners in the early 20th century, the Chinese began to question the traditional ways that had not saved them, including their sacred script. Scholars in the 1910s called it the greatest impediment to literacy and democracy, and even discussed switching the language to Esperanto or adopting the Latin alphabet. Most ambitious of them all, Mao Zedong, famously told the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, "Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate." He might have replaced all Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet, had Joseph Stalin not convinced him that a nation as great as China should have its own form of writing instead of borrowing another culture's. The chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution further exhausted the momentum for language reform, and by late 1970s, people had lost all interest in radical, top-down change. Chinese characters, saved by a foreign dictator and a series of domestic anti-traditionalist movements, survived to be passed on to the next generation.
China's centuries-long status as the superpower of Asia, followed by its still-fresh memory of the century of humiliation imposed by foreign nations -- a trajectory epitomized in the fate of the Chinese language -- help instill in its people a strong national identity and an "us versus them" mindset. When foreigners speak Chinese, they are crossing this invisible identity boundary, still largely demarcated by the Chinese language. It is a phenomenon that can be fascinating, and perhaps a bit disorienting, for a Chinese listener to experience.
As flocks of foreigners enroll in Chinese language schools and universities, Chinese people often read this as a positive statement about their modern society, proof of both China's expanding international clout and the resilience of its culture; proof that, even after being trampled by foreign powers and destructive political movements, China still has not lost its appeal, its place in the world. This reassurance carries special significance at this moment in China's history, a time when Chinese students are pouring hours into English lessons instead of classical Chinese poetry, when Chinese workers are building American products for foreign consumers, and when, for example, Chinese movie-goers are spending more money on foreign blockbusters like Titanic 3D. "I am sad that our predecessors destroyed our culture ... but did not build a beautiful new world," the well-known blogger Han Han recently wrote. "As one from the younger generation, none of us know if we are ever able to make up for everything."
The Chinese government, too, seems to realize that its aggressive campaign to push soft power abroad must also deal with the difficulty of the Chinese language, which is once labeled "a Great Wall erected between the masses and the new culture." It has established Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms -- government-run cultural outposts that teach Chinese language and history -- in more than 700 locations worldwide, including many American universities, and supplied them with a steady stream of Beijing-trained and -financed language teachers. Many universities in the U.S. turned down the offer for fear of government censorship, but others, wishing to expand their Chinese education on the cheap, embraced them. "The Chinese are very clear on what they are trying to achieve," Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council told the New York Times. "They want to change the perception of China -- to combat negative propaganda with positive propaganda."
When the first-discovered piece of animal bone inscribed with ancient Chinese characters was found in 1899, China was disintegrating into the hands of Western powers, and the proto-nationalist Boxer rebels were slaughtering missionaries and diplomats in retaliation. More than 100 years later, these events have become history lessons in China's classrooms, as the government courts the West with Chinese language and culture. "Sanshinian hedong, sanshinian hexi," as they may have taught the foreigners, "30 years east of the river, 30 years west of the river." Or as the Americans say, every dog has its day.
When left to the hands of its speakers, Chinese becomes the cursive characters tumbling down the red scrolls on families' front door during Spring Festival, or the snarky, catchy phrases that fill its modern pop music. Or it is the syllables uttered by a foreigner to a taxi driver, a watermelon vendor, or an old man practicing water calligraphy in the park, and instantly lighting up his or her face.
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