Mandarin Mashup July 7, 2012
- SA-based Chinese Language and Cultural Advice is helping two-way trade - Adelaidenow
Leonie McKeon is the owner/managing director of Chinese Language & Cultural Advice. Picture: Bianca De Marchi. Source: The Advertiser
LEONIE McKeon plays an increasingly important role in Australia's business success in China.
As the owner of Chinese Language and Cultural Advice, she trains people around Australia in the ways of doing business with the greater China region.
Ms McKeon's business is one of the largest private teachers of Mandarin in Australia, helping hundreds of people to learn the language each year, but she insists that cultural awareness is just as critical to business success in Asia.
Apart from doing business in China, with Chinese people increasingly buying Australian mines, farms and wineries, the ability to speak Mandarin has many advantages.
"It is very important because it teaches people how the Chinese think and behave," she said. "It can mean the difference between a good solid relationship with your client and not understanding your client."
Ms McKeon said her company has helped countless companies achieve greater business success in China through a better understanding of people and culture."We're really just at the start of this whole relationship with China and how much business can expand is really up to us, but most businesses can do something in China," she said.
"It is important that people do the hard yards and learn about the culture and the people they are dealing with.
"The more language and culture you understand, the more you can take risks with China."
While her company's primary role is teaching Mandarin language and cultural awareness, its practical advice to help people and companies do business in China includes communication styles, negotiating, working with Chinese people, induction of staff, marketing and strategies.
After living in the Greater China Region for several years, her practical hands-on experience provides a unique platform to help Australians understand Chinese language and culture, along with the knowledge and experience of her six Chinese employees.
Ms McKeon studied Mandarin and anthropology at the University of Adelaide before winning an entrepreneurial scholarship which enabled her to start Chinese Language and Cultural Advice in 1998.
"I saw a need for a practical, user-friendly Mandarin course and a need to teach people how Chinese people think," she said.
"When I started not that many Australian companies were thinking about China, but because I got into it early I've been able to write all the material for the courses and grow with the market."
Ms McKeon said her business has grown enormously in the past two financial years with further significant growth expected this year.
In future Ms McKeon would like to roll out her Mandarin language course throughout Australian schools where teaching of the language is ineffective for people from a non-Chinese speaking background, she said.
"They have a problem and I have a solution because we've d! eveloped our course over many years with great success," she said.
"We need to teach young people Mandarin because much of our future lies in Asia and it is spoken in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia.
"If we want to embrace our potential in China we have to learn the language and culture and that means teaching our young people at school."
For more details please see www.clca.com.au
- iTunes Wades Into Chinese-Language Controversy - Wall Street Journal
- EPA
- Two women walk past the Apple Store in Hong Kong, China on June 27, 2012.
When Apple launched its iTunes online store for Hong Kong last week, making it easier for locals to buy and download music and videos, some of its efforts got lost in translation.
On accessing the iTunes store for the first time, some Hong Kong users were irritated to find that the store was listing a number of song titles by the city's popstars in Mandarin pinyin, a system that transcribes Chinese characters into phonetic Latin script, instead of displaying titles transliterated for the Cantonese language, which is spoken by the majority of the population.
For example, the popular Cantonese pop song titled "Autumn Wind, Autumn Rain" would be written and pronounced as qiu feng qiu yu using Mandarin pinyin. Though there is no broadly accepted official system for rendering Cantonese using the Roman alphabet, a transliteration for Cantonese speakers would be closer to cou feng cou yu.
"Those are CANTO pop [songs]," wrote one Hong Kong-based user on Twitter. "Use cantonese [sic] phonetics."
A former British colony, Hong Kong returned to mainland Chinese rule in 1997, but has stayed proudly loyal to its own native dialect and customs. Many locals resent the intrusion of Mandarin—which China's government has promoted for decades as the official language across the border—and fear that Cantonese, spoken by 96% of the population, is gradually being shunted aside.
Until June 27, when Apple launched the iTunes stores in Hong Kong and 11 other Asian markets, the iTunes store had previously been available only in three Asian-Pacific countries: Australia, Japan and New Zealand. The iTunes store—which does offer Hong Kong users a number of songs in traditional Chinese characters, though many are displayed only with Mandarin pinyin—is currently the world's biggest popular music vendor, selling over 16 billion songs last year. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, as well as in Taiwan and in many overseas Chinese communities, while simplified characters are used on the mainland.
Anger over Apple's offering is just the latest linguistic squall to have hit Hong Kong this year. Last weekend, the city's newly sworn in leader gave his inaugural speech entirely in Mandarin, prompting critics to suggest that he was "kowtowing" to Beijing. Earlier this spring, locals also launched protests against retailers such as Giordano's and agnes b for spurning traditional Chinese characters in favor of simplified ones.
Some responding to Hong Kong's iTunes store launch mixed praise with criticism. "I thought iTunes wouldn't have many good Cantonese songs, but they even have [Cantopop singer] Paula Tsui," wrote one Hong Kong user on Twitter. "Still, they're all in Mandarin pinyin. Unless you actually listened to them, you wouldn't know what songs they were."
For the first time this year, Hong Kong's census revealed that Mandarin has overtaken English as the city's most common second language. Still, the language remains decidedly a minority tongue: While nearly half of city residents say they can speak Mandarin, it's the customary language of choice for only 1.4% of people.
Calls and emails to Apple weren't immediately returned Thursday.
– Te-Ping Chen. Follow her on Twitter @tepingchen
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