Channel NewsAsia reports that Central Singapore CDC launched a website on cultural dos and don'ts to allow youths to glean more information on races and to appreciate different cultures. Right now, the information appears to consist entirely of customs and etiquette for Singapore.

This is probably one of the more interesting phenomena to appear as a result of globalization and the internet. As more online games and virtual worlds appear and grow in their complexity, you are left thinking that the Chinese gold farmer is just the tip of a bizarre new iceberg. While most of the gaming companies have sought to ban the practice of gold farming, the fact that it is a $7-12 billion industry won't escape the eyes of many who are not gaming purists.

Google may be getting high marks for its highly localized web site, but according to this blogger, the customer service, online or otherwise, stinks in China. This is a transcript/translation of a video where Chinese was spoken, but I think the blogger's point comes across clearly enough.

In the U.S., we look to China for new business opportunities, and China looks to...Africa.

 ...China is pursuing its own interests. Just as surely, much of what it is attempting will not pan out, or will have deleterious effects, particularly since no distinction is made between governments that are relatively clean and representative and those that are odious.

The World Wide Web has had a dramatic effect on each of us as it touches numerous aspects of our business and personal lives. Dedicated to the art and science of Web globalization one expert organization appeared on the landscape in 2000 and has prominently emerged as a leading web expert. Byte Level Research helps marketing and Web teams create web sites that truly speak to the world, across languages and borders. We are pleased to share the insights of Byte Level Research President and Chief Analyst John Yunker.

Technology advances on the web and many other fronts continue to build momentum and impact our business. The bottom line remains the same - how do we provide maximum value at maximum efficiency, simultaneously retaining a very “human” corporate culture? In January McElroy created a new executive position designed to ensure that long term vision, customer focus, and IT innovations are strategically aligned. Meet VP of Strategy Bob Donaldson in this month’s staff profile. His business philosophies and self effacing humor make this profile a delightful one. As talented as Bob is, he is just quirky enough to fit right in at McElroy.

Onward!

An interview with Byte Level Research’s John Yunker

McElroy Translation recently had the privilege of interviewing a top web globalization consultant about the state of web globalization today, and where it is headed. For E-Buzz readers unfamiliar with who Byte Level Research is and what they do—Byte Level researches hundreds of websites on a regular basis to pinpoint what makes a global web site truly successful and shares this information through reports, benchmark services, and the monthly publication: Global by Design. Their goal is to help marketing and Web teams create Web sites that truly speak to the world, across languages and borders.

McElroy Translation: Your website says Byte Level Research started in 2000. How has the climate of U.S. companies doing business globally changed since then? Did the end of the dot com boom have an impact on how the importance of web globalization was perceived?

John Yunker: During the dot com years, Web globalization was hot, but prematurely so. I say prematurely because Internet penetration globally - particularly broadband penetration - was still in its early stages.

After the dot com bust, Web globalization spending virtually froze for a period as companies took a much-needed reality break. But over the past two years, companies have been spending robustly – and, thankfully, realistically on Web globalization. If anything, most companies are now too cautious in their Web globalization investments, running the risk of missing out on opportunities in many emerging markets.

What we are now witnessing on a large scale are companies transforming themselves from “domestic companies serving foreign markets” to “global companies serving local markets.” Many companies now generate more than half of their revenues from outside of their domestic markets and the Internet has played a large role in this evolution.

McElroy: Byte Level Research has evolved since 2000 as well, with the breadth and depth of content continuously expanding. In the past seven years, what have you learned that surprised you the most?

Yunker: The most surprising development would have to be the success of Wikipedia. Before Wikipedia, you would have been hard-pressed to find a content-rich Web site that supported more than 20 languages; today, Wikipedia offers content in 250 languages. And the fact that this is user-generated content is amazing; I believe there are valuable lessons that corporations can take from Wikipedia in regards to transparency, global consistency, and decentralized content creation and management.

I also think it’s important to recognize Unicode for how it has helped Web sites like Wikipedia easily support so many different languages. In 2000, Unicode was not well supported on the Web or in software applications. As a result, it was very difficult to work with languages of various encodings, such as Japanese, Russian, and Arabic. Today, Unicode is (almost) everywhere and it has dramatically improved the lives of those who work in this industry.

Unicode is a truly spectacular achievement – and the volunteers and companies that have championed it have played a major role in creating a truly global Internet.

There are still challenges ahead, namely the domain name system, which does not support Unicode. There are many security risks inherent in doing so and ICANN is trying to come up with a viable solution.

We recently announced the addition of Bob to the McElroy executive team with a formal press release in our April E-Buzz.

However, as most of our readers know, our featured employee corner of E-Buzz is a less formal invitation to get to know some of the “real” people here at McElroy. The editors of E-Buzz were impressed with the info from the “real” Bob Donaldson, coupled with his extensive resume. We hope you will find the “real” Bob as interesting as we did.

When Bob isn’t slaying dragons in the corporate IT world, he runs, reads, travels and follows baseball.

Bob recently took up long distance running and finished his first half-marathon in 1:48. He says, “The training gives me quiet time to think and also helps build a habit of persistence. As with long-distance running, the difference between success (meeting the customer’s expectations) and failure often boils down to persistence."

Bob reads widely and voraciously … history, theology, classics, medieval texts and spy novels. He served on the national board of the Association of Classical Christian Schools and was a co-founder of Regents School of Austin, an ACCS school which teaches students the tools of life-long learning that have served him well.

Bob loves travel and international cultures. He has lived in Germany (twice), studied in both Germany and the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia), and traveled on business or pleasure to Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Russia (and the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Estonia & Latvia), Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Mexico.

Bob is also an avid baseball fan. Do not expect to start a short conversation with him about the Astros. He is especially interested in following the minor leagues and typically sees the Round Rock Express several times a season. He also “collects” baseball field visits as his travel schedule allows.

Bob’s professional achievements

In the process of getting to know the “real” Bob Donaldson, we also uncovered an impressive list of professional achievements that bear mention in this month’s employee profile.

Many McElroy employees are asked the question: “What languages do you speak?” Most of us who are not translators are proficient in at least one other language, but Bob commands fluency in three: German, Russian and Czech, and can handle basic tourist phrases in several more (Italian, Flemish, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Rumanian). He can also read most Slavic languages as well as Latin, Old English and some Old Icelandic. Friends tell him he needs an “emergency interrupt” button when he get started on historical and comparative linguistics. What’s more, his international business experience encompasses substantially more than a conference in Toronto, and a visit to an office in Singapore—Bob has participated in numerous business development, solution delivery and management consulting engagements in Europe (Germany, UK, Russia, Belgium), the Far East (Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore), Australia and Latin America (Mexico, Brazil) including an expatriate assignment in Germany.

Combining his extensive knowledge of languages and business, Bob has built an impressive list of technical titles as well, including: Software Architect, Project Manager, SW Development Director, VP Engineering, and VP Professional Services. Bob has provided technical and business consulting expertise to many Fortune 500 companies before coming to McElroy.

Where the “real” Bob gets his business insight

Bob cites Dilbert and his manager as his favorite sources of business insight. He says, “I often laugh at myself as I see a reflection of my foibles; seeing the humorous side of serious issues (and acknowledging my own blind spots or weaknesses) helps build mutual trust and teamwork. The title of a Jim Collins essay on leadership, ’The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve’, describes the type of leadership I aspire to."

We think that Bob’s educational and professional experience will offer McElroy a unique perspective on the challenges ahead as we adapt to the turbulent market environment currently surrounding language services.

Bob understands first hand the challenges of doing business in a multi-lingual and cross-cultural environment. As we help our customers do business globally, his understanding will help us bridge the gap between business need and technology promise. Whether negotiating a custom application development contract in Australia, or the details of an environmental services joint venture with a former Soviet research laboratory, Bob reminds us that the real challenges are with true meaning behind the words. As McElroy extends its reach to become “globally local,” this experience will help us build solid, mutually beneficial relationships.

The SxSW Interactive Festival has been coming of age the last few years, and the March 2007 Festival, themed “Making Ideas Real,” boasted several panels and speakers focused on real-world applications of technology and emerging trends to watch. Keynote speaker Will Wright expanded on the theme by stating that “Technology is an extension of the human body/expression. The most important things computers do for us is extend our imaginations. The computer is becoming a tool of self expression through websites, blogs, etc. and paradigm shifts are hitting us more and more frequently over time.”

A dramatic shift in the focus of SxSW Interactive is the impact of Web 2.0 as a platform for collaboration technologies such as wikis, social networking technologies and effective machine to machine communication and many of the SxSW Interactive events focused on Web 2.0 topics. In the panel “Emerging Social and Technology Trends,” the four pillars of Web 2.0 were defined as technologies that support social interaction, enable and encourage user participation, lead to an enhanced user experience (such as rating and tagging options) and are characterized by open access to data.

The “Convergence Culture” speech by Henry Jenkins defined Web 2.0 as social community that works together to solve conceptual problems by remixing content. Wikipedia, probably the best known wiki, stands as a monument to participatory culture with its open process by which knowledge is produced and made available to the public. From a business perspective there are valid concerns that intellectual property issues are at odds with an expanding participatory culture.

Population and demographic trends influencing the social and technological forces shaping the emergence of Web 2.0 range from extremely local advances allowing us to connect data to where we live at micro level to the expansion of instant collaboration with global users. The technological infrastructure of the “Global South,” essentially comprised of Africa, India and China, is limited in many cases to Internet access via phone lines which is an important factor in designing Web 2.0 sites since the vast majority of future audiences and consumers will originate in these regions.

How to harvest the potential of customer interfaces to take advantage of collaborative technologies was explored in the panels “World Domination via Collaboration,” which included a lively debate on best practices for opening your web portal to customer comments and “Virtual Teaming: Collaboration Across Time and Space,” exploring the challenges of a 24/7 work environment comprised of co-workers you may never meet or even talk to in real time.

The panel “Virtual Teaming: Collaborating Across Time and Space” offered an astute analysis on outsourcing, primarily to India, China and Russia. The panelists affirmed that with some searching you’ll find an extraordinarily intelligent, creative group of people with different approaches to things we’re doing and educational models like learning labs and incubators. This is a global community and it’s important to cultivate teams that work well together, and that can be especially difficult on a global scale as good communication is challenging regardless of language or time barriers.

The consensus across several of the panels is that small teams are the most effective, regardless of locale. It’s ideal to have one person from each discipline in order to originate the best ideas and products, and gain more respect for everyone’s fields and specialties. According to industry leaders like Google, communication tends to break down when the team gets larger than 12 so at that point it’s best to divide into smaller, more specialized teams to facilitate effective flow of communication.

Certainly there are no conclusive solutions to the difficulty of working on and managing a physically disparate team but emerging technologies are blurring time zones and making effective long-distance collaboration more feasible and cost-effective.

(Or, what do blogs and Youtube have to do with cultural preservation?)

The writer of this article laments the coming of one or two great monocultures (such as U.S. and Chinese), and he is not the first to predict such a thing will happen. Indeed, with the acceleration of globalization, and the increase of broadband and internet access worldwide, the extinction of hundreds, if not thousands of languages and cultures seems imminent. Every other week, a news article proclaims that English will soon be the only language the world speaks, and everyone will read Harry Potter, drink Starbucks and listen to Britney Spears.

However, the evolving ideas, technologies, and even new cultures that the Internet has created are only the tip of the iceberg for how humans will choose to align, do business and communicate with each other in the future.

Indeed, in the early and mid nineties, before the commercialization of the Internet, one could find many articles [see footnotes] lamenting the death of the written word and creative mind in children, as too many Western children seemed doomed to lifetimes of passively receiving their entertainment via television.

Even up until the widespread popularity of blogs, and the introduction of Youtube, experts were announcing the death of active creativity in future generations, or calling popular resurgences in personal creativity “nostalgic.” Now, of course, so much of this has been turned on its head, and it is getting very hard to find a web site that isn’t begging you to join in a discussion, comment on its articles, and contribute your own original content.

So, what do blogs and Youtube have to do with the preservation (and creation) of distinct cultures worldwide? The evolution of the Internet is witnessing the empowerment of the user. In the next 10-20 years, almost all new Internet users will arrive as non-native English speakers, if they speak English at all, thanks to the permeation of broadband and wireless technologies into all areas of the globe, and efforts like the $100 laptop initiative are bringing more and more children in impoverished and developing parts of the world online.

In all likelihood, the Internet’s newest arrivals will likely want to know about Western culture, but they will hardly wish to remain passive observers and users of it. Like so many users worldwide--Brazilians on Orkut and Koreans on Cyworld, for instance--these new Internet users will want to leave their own personal marks on the Internet, participate in discussions with their distinct voices, and yes, bring their own unique cultures and languages into the mix.

Not only will the Internet see the introduction of real-world cultures, offering their artistic and creative forms of expression, the Internet has, of course, provided us with a myriad of distinct subcultures that may very well one day become kinds of virtual cultures of their own (some would argue that they have already)--for instance, txt spk (Text Speak):

• AAMF--as a matter of fact
• AFAIC--as far as I’m concerned
• BBFN--bye bye for now
• BCNU--be seeing you
• DM--don’t mind
• F2T--free to talk
• HTH--hope this/to help
• ICCL--I couldn’t care less
• IYSS--if you say so
• IMO--in my opinion
• LOL--laughing out loud
• ROFL--rolling on the floor laughing
• TTFN--ta ta for now

...the unique language of Leet, e.g.:

• 0w|\| or 0wn3d - One of the most popular l33t words it is very loosely defined as beaten or can simply be an expression of awe, for example, ’I 0wn3d you’ means ’I have beaten you in a very humiliating fashion’, or ’0wn4ge!’ which means ’That was (or is) very nifty’.
• w00t - Derived from ’hoot’, this is defined as ’yay’, it can be used, for example, upon victory or, possibly, the release and procurement of a new video card.
• 13wt - Treasure, good merchandise, possessions, a misspelling of loot. Most commonly referring to pirated software, items in a game or promotional giveaways.
• h4x0r - Hacker, can be used for a real hacker or simply a very skillful person. This is the most common occurrence of the -0r clause.
• ph33r - Fear, most commonly used in such phrases as, ’Ph33r m3!’ or ’Ph33r |\/|y 1337 sk1llz!’ It can also be written as, ’ph34r’.
• sk1llz - Obviously derived from ’skill’, referring to skill in some type of online game, programming or hacking. Many times used in conjunction with ’m4d’. As a general rule, if one has sk1llz, one is to be ph33r3d.
• m4d - Mad, mostly used as a descriptive term meaning great, for example, ’h3s g0t m4d sk1llz’.

...and who-knows-what cultures will materialize within more advanced virtual environments like SecondLife?

Professor Salikoko S. Mufwene doesn’t think that English isn’t a “language killer,” but that the spreading and evolution of languages among groups is much more complex. He also says that the economically-dominant one doesn’t always “win” in different times and places where several languages are spoken.

Globalization isn’t a linear, thoroughly universal process, but rather, a description of various interdependent global systems, where language use depends upon a given situation, and any given aspect of a permeated culture may be adapted at varying degrees by another. In short, our tendency to see one language and/or culture killing another is oversimplified.

An example of this would be the growing trend for U.S. businesses to translate their marketing and product content into Spanish and politicians to devote significant campaign communication in Spanish even as English spreads across the globe, and is similarly touted as the only language the world (and U.S.) needs.

What is your opinion?

Do you think that the Internet and globalization will turn all of humanity into a monocultural population, speaking the same language, reading the same books, following the same pop and sports icons?

Or, do you think that the increase of user control over the content of the Internet in recent years, coupled with more widespread Internet access to the developing world, will stimulate a new world of distinctly different cultures and viewpoints, albeit divided along more virtual lines than geopolitical ones?

Footnotes

www.worldandi.com

findarticles.com

www.wfs.org

query.nytimes.com

Don't take our word, or the word of another translation vendor--MarketingSherpa offers a real-life case study to answer this question.

2006 attendance at the International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA) annual World Congress was depressingly flat. Members from around the world bought about the same number of tickets as they had in 2005.

How could the marketing team boost ticket sales for a 77-year old event in an industry that's coping with budget cuts, as well as being notoriously tight-fisted about executive travel? Event Manager, Megan DeLeon, and Marketing Manager, Ginni Mercer, had to find a way.

Even though global businesspeople, especially highly literate publishing execs, increasingly speak and read English, DeLeon and Mercer wondered what sort of impact translating marketing copy into native languages would have.