Travels in the Riel World

Students who take advantage of study abroad programs have a wide variety of experiences. In the best scenarios, they not only have a fun and enriching life experience, but also come away with nuggets of insight into the culture of a new country. That’s what happened for Laura Corser, who was recently profiled in the Boston Globe after spending a semester in Seoul, South Korea.

One of her key insights into Korean culture:

ACT YOUR AGE: “Korean etiquette is highly focused on age and rank. Often the first question out of someone’s mouth (after ‘what’s your name?’) is ‘how old are you?’ One habit I had to acquire (other than taking off your shoes when you enter a house and several restaurants or eating rice with a spoon) was the style of interacting with elders, like serving them with both hands, or with one’s free hand on the arm if only one hand is required.”

The Chinese are proud to be hosting this year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing, and they certainly want the home team to perform well. But perhaps not too well.

There was an interesting cultural note in a recent Washington Post article about Chinese rooting interests in these Olympics. It seems that while the Chinese are proud of their nation’s growing might on the world stage, some of them think it’s a bit too soon - and too showy - for their athletes to emerge with the most medals this year. It’s typical for the Chinese to be self deprecating, and this reminded me of a Chinese-born woman who used to work with my wife. She was horrified at the thought of filling out a performance review for herself at work because it would be unseemly to be too self congratulatory.

Apparently, that attitude even extends to the Olympics. Here is the telling anecdote from Francesco Sisci in his Post story:

The Olympic Games aren’t just a show for me; they’re a family affair, and one that’s turning out quite differently from what I’d expected. I’m Italian, but I’ve lived in China for about 20 years. My wife is Chinese — and very patriotic — and my two daughters grew up here…So you can imagine my state of mind before these games. I thought we all had to be very patriotic — that is, pro-China.

But when my mother announced before the games that she hoped that China would win the most medals, my wife, Luoyan, looked at me as if my mother had said something inappropriate. “Well,” she replied, “I hope that China comes in second and America will be first.”

She’s not alone. There’s a sizable undercurrent of hope here that the United States will top the medal rankings…The subtle reluctance to win may also be related to China’s being host of the games; by coming in first, China would look like a showoff. It could also be part of an idea that sport stands for economic and political might, and China knows that it certainly can’t challenge American supremacy, at least not yet.

“It’s not our moment. It would be too ambitious and too unreal to be the first in the Olympics now,” said a friend of mine at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s premier think tank. “Many people, even among the leaders, think like this.”

I came across some interesting cultural insights in a recent article about Egypt in the International Herald Tribune. Although the story, on its surface, is about Egyptian perceptions of the U.S., just begin reading and you’ll discover some anecdotes that shed light into Egyptian and Arab culture.

My favorite, at the start of the article, describes the local penchant for giving a wrong answer rather than no answer at all:

Emad Refaat strode out of his workshop with purpose, his grease-covered hands pointing down the road even before he could see the road.

“Come here,” he said, his voice strong with reassurance. “Go to the light, make the first right, that’s Salah el-Din Street.”

Sure?

“I am sure, totally sure.”

But he was wrong, totally wrong..

“I wanted to help,” said Refaat, 28, who was slightly embarrassed when he was asked why he gave the wrong directions with such conviction. “I was actually going to tell you to ask the flower vendor on the corner. He knows all the streets.”

Navigating Egypt can be a challenge of understanding, not just the language, but its culture, values and norms…In Egypt, it is routine, absolutely routine, to get the wrong directions.

That is not because people are mischievous, but because if you ask for help, they feel obligated to try to help - even if they send you off in the wrong direction.

Why in the world, you might now be asking, would someone think it was helpful to give wrong directions? Here is the answer:

Egyptian society values hospitality and personal honor over precision and directness…”Here, even if someone sends you in the wrong direction, he still feels that he did what he was supposed to do,” said Hamdi Taha, head of a charity, Karam al-Islam, and a professor of communications at Al Azhar university. “He doesn’t think he misguided you. He helped. Right and wrong is a relative thing.”

This cultural explanation is as logical to an Egyptian mind as it might be illogical to a Westerner. That, to me, is what makes culture so fascinating.

A few weeks ago, I saw an article in the NY Times about the exploding popularity of “cellphone novels” in Japan.

Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists.

An interesting phenomenon, to be sure, but as I filed the thought away I couldn’t decide what, if anything, it said about Japanese culture. Now, though, thanks to a post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I was led to an interesting description of the cell phone novel from the perspective of Japanese communication styles.

Is this the future of literature? In Japanese, maybe. There are a number of features of Japan’s language and culture that make a cell phone novel more palatable than it would be in English. First, Japanese grammar is much better suited than English to the kind of short sentences writing on a cell phone encourages.

As a high-context language, a complete sentence in Japanese can consist of just a single, lonely verb. Japanese speakers and writers frequently and freely omit subjects and objects from their sentences, expecting the reader to figure out what’s going on. Go figure. The use of Chinese characters also serves to compact sentences. Since you don’t have to actually spell out entire words, as in English, but can represent them with an ideogram, you can say a lot more in a much smaller space.

Secondly, and perhaps just as important, cell phone novels tap into long traditions of Japanese prose and poetry. First, even a cursory examination of a cell phone novel will show a visual connection to the poetic traditions of haiku and tanka. The connection doesn’t end there, at its best the writing itself has an economy and - I’ll regret saying this - poetry that taps into the same tradition. The medium - you try typing a novel on the keypad of a cell phone - forces the writers to make every word count, and (in Japanese at least) it shows.

The themes, as well, harken back to traditional Japanese themes. The first “modern” novel (written by Murasaki Shikibu in 11th century Japan), The Tale of Genji, was basically a high school love story, and nothing has changed since then…And the long, long literary tradition there, combined with the frequent use of public transportation, means that books in general, whether written on cell phones or not, occupy a much more important place in Japanese culture than in the West.

If you’re interested in learning more about high-context langauge and other such forms of communication, by the way, you can check out some of the writings of Edward Hall, such as The Silent Language.

Remarkably, about half of the languages currently spoken in the world are said to be in danger of going extinct during the coming century. A story in the International Herald Tribune reports:

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

New research, reported Tuesday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

These facts are the result of research done by the National Geographic Society, which also ran a recent story on the topic:

…in most cases, languages die a slow death, as people simply abandon their native tongues when they become surrounded by people speaking a more common language…

“Languages not being learned by children are not just endangered—they’re doomed,” said Lyle Campbell, a linguistics professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

This summer, the Enduring Voices researchers traveled to Australia, whose aboriginal languages are among the world’s most endangered.

In the Northern Territory, the team documented three speakers of Magati Ke. In western Australia, they found three speakers of the little-known Yawuru language. Deep in the outback, they also located a man with rudimentary knowledge of Amurdag, a language previously declared extinct.

“Australia is amazing, because humans have been there for 50,000 years, and they represent an unbroken link to the past in a way that other places on Earth don’t,” Swarthmore’s Harrison said.

The Chinese are busy preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics. In addition to infrastructure, tourism and environmental projects, the government is also apparently engaged in a campaign to rid Beijing of bad (but humorous) translations on restaurant menus. The Associated Press has the story:

Hungry visitors to next summer’s Beijing Olympics won’t have to choose between “steamed crap” and “virgin chicken” if Chinese authorities succeed in ridding restaurant menus of mangled English translations.

The Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list with 2,753 proposed names for dishes and drinks, designed to replace bizarre and sometimes ridiculous translations on menus, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

Foreigners are often stumped by dish names such as “virgin chicken” (a young chicken dish) or “burnt lion’s head” (Chinese-style pork meatballs). Other garbled names include “The temple explodes the chicken cube” (kung pao chicken) or “steamed crap” (steamed carp).

“These translations either scare or embarrass foreign customers and may cause misunderstanding on China’s diet habits,” Xinhua said.

It’s the latest effort by Beijing Olympics organizers to clean up the city and ensure that the best image is presented to the hundreds of thousands of visitors expected next summer.

There was an interesting cultural snippet in a recent NY Times interview of novelist Dalia Sofer, who was born in Iran but now lives in New York. It came when Sofer discussed the communication style of Iranians.

I would think that Iranian-born women see memoir-writing as a kind of protest against a society that demands so much stillness and silence of them.

Perhaps. Even Farsi, as a language, is elusive and indirect. There’s this whole idea of taarof — you say something you don’t mean, and the other person is supposed to pick up on it.

For example?

If I am visiting you, I may say, “It is getting late; I must go,” and you say, “No, please stay,” and I am supposed to know that you really want me to go. People have to pick up on codes.

Saying what you don’t mean, but with the assumption that you will still be understood. One more example of how communication styles differ around the globe.

That’s the question posed in this recent article in the International Herald Tribune, which in turn quotes from a debate taking place among some French leaders.

France is the country that produced the Enlightenment, Descartes’s one-liner, “I think, therefore I am,” and the solemn pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and other celebrity philosophers. But in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet.

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Needless to say, not everyone agrees.

But the disdain for reflection may be going a bit too far. It certainly has set the French intellectual class on edge.

“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Lagarde’s comments.

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in café conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials BHL “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases. I’m pro-American and pro-market, so I could have voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, but this anti-intellectual tendency is one of the reasons that I did not.”

Of course, perhaps the real lesson is here isn’t whether to think or not to think. What’s more interesting, from a cultural perspective at least, is that the French have found a way to think and debate about whether they should be thinking and debating.

A number of international businesspeople who work in the U.S. or with Americans have apparently spurred the development of a new consulting industry - that of the “accent reduction” coach. There is an interesting article about it in the International Herald Tribune:

It was not what Sergei Petukhov said. It was how he said it. “The way I said ‘accent reduction,’ he couldn’t understand me,” Petukhov said. That was enough for Petukhov, a Moscow native who works for the law firm Kaye Scholer as a scientific adviser, to get his employer’s approval to pay for training to decrease his Russian accent.

He is one of many educated, non-native English speakers working in the United States who take voice training and accent reduction to improve presentations, workshops and everyday conversations with their American-born co-workers.

Petukhov’s accent coach, Jennifer Pawlitschek, said that from her experience in New York, the field is growing. “Here it’s hot, and I think it’s because it’s an international crossroads,” she said, both because the United Nations is in the city and because of New York’s role in global financial markets.

Pawlitschek, who has a Master of Fine Arts degree in drama from the University of California, Irvine, said “the posture of the mouth” affects accent. She teaches how to change “the way you hold your jaw, lips and tongue,” along with stress and intonation.

She contended that the term “accent reduction” is a misnomer. “Accent reduction is learning an accent. It is learning an American accent,” she said.

English has for some time now been a common second language around the globe, used in technology, tourism and business. Now, some universities - particularly business schools - are beginning to teach courses in English, regardless of the language of the country in which the school is located. In part, this is being driven by a desire to attract international students. According to this NY Times article:

In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization…

Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities…

“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives. “It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”

Some argue that this is merely the natural adaptation of an older custom of utilizing a common language for universities.

Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalization, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca most used by universities.

“English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.”

The U.S. military apparently recognizes the need to train troops in cultural awareness, so it has developed some virtual reality technology that enables soldiers to practice interacting with people from different societies. At the moment, not surprisingly, this is particularly focused on learning about Iraqis and Arabs. According to an article in the Arizona Daily Star:

The U.S. military historically has been weak at understanding the mind-set of enemies, Proffitt said. By promoting cultural awareness, the new training system may help change that, he said.

“I think that’s the hard part for the Army. We tend to go over there and fight with our machinery and our tactics without a really innate understanding of the psyche of the other guy,” he said.

Remarkably, not only does the technology give individuals the sense that they are talking to a real person, but it is designed to warn about potential cultural mistakes being made during the conversation.

To increase the chance of gaining Iraqi cooperation, soldiers also need to be on guard for cultural pitfalls such as inquiring about the well-being of an Iraqi man’s wife, which is considered extremely rude. The virtual translator is programmed to warn interrogators when they stray into that kind of sensitive territory.

Translating from one language to another is not always an easy task.  Anyone who has traveled much has certainly gotten a chuckle now and then from seeing either a bad translation or a too literal translation of a local phrase into English.  The Beijing government has apparently noticed these mistakes, as well, and it is now determined to clean up as many translation problems as possible prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics. 

This humorous article notes the government’s efforts and delights in sharing some of the more humorous results of ”Chinglish” translations.

Visitors to China’s capital can stroll through “Racist Park,” enjoy a plate of “Crap in the Grass” and stop by a Starbucks franchise for a cup for “Christmas Bland” coffee. Now the Beijing government is trying to clean up such mistranslations and sloppy editing (including the inversion of “a” and “r” in “carp” on menus) before an expected 500,000 foreigners arrive for the 2008 Summer Olympics. …

The campaign includes teaching 300 English phrases to 48,000 taxi drivers, helping restaurants edit menus and standardizing public signs. The English translations on signs range from charming mistakes to baffling renditions that spread anger and confusion. …

Many of the funniest examples are found on packaging, such as instructions on a Chinese-made candle warning owners to “keep this candle out of children.” “For a foreigner, eating in a Chinese restaurant can be daunting, especially when you have a choice of dishes on the English menu ranging from ‘Swallowing the Clouds’ to ‘Hot Crap,’ ” a newspaper reported.

Another article in an Australian newspaper makes similar points, with different but equally humorous examples:

Also at risk are the literally correct translations such as saliva chicken (a cold dish of succulent poached chicken in a peanut, garlic, ginger and green onion, and no saliva sauce) and pocked-face ladies tofu (mapo dofu, the chilli hot bean curd dish named after an old woman called Ma).  Simple errors such as pee soup (pea soup) and hot crap (spicy crab) will soon go the way of Beijing’s old hutong neighbourhoods.

It makes sense for Beijing to clean up these translation errors, although I have to say there’s also a certain amount of cross-cultural charm involved in stumbling across the occasional harmless language mistake during one’s travels.

We all know, of course, that people in various cultures can have vastly different ways of communicating.  But different ways of swearing?  Well, as this recent article from the Washington Post points out, when French-speaking Canadians get angry, they tend to spew religious words that could have been taken straight out of Catholic Church service.

“Oh, tabernacle!” The man swore in French as a car splashed through a puddle, sending water onto his pants. He could never be quoted in the papers here. It is too profane.  So are other angry oaths that sound innocuous in English: chalice, host, baptism. In French-speaking Quebec, swearing sounds like an inventory being taken at a church.

English-speaking Canadians use profanities that would be well understood in the United States, many of them scatological or sexual terms. But the Quebecois prefer to turn to religion when they are mad.

This article amused me.  Not just because of the different curses across cultures, but because part of my childhood suddenly came to life.  You see, my late grandparents are from Quebec and my father grew up speaking French at home.  Hence, when I was young, I was led to believe that the French term for tabernacle was a swear word.

In terms of culture, though, the real interesting question here is why different cultures choose these words as curses.

“When you get mad, you look for words that attack what represses you,” said Louise Lamarre, a Montreal cinematographer … ”In America, you are so Puritan that the swearing is mostly about sex. Here, since we were repressed so long by the church, people use religious terms.”

And the words that are shocking in English — including the slang for intercourse — are so mild in Quebecois French they appear routinely in the media. But not church terms.

“You swear about things that are taboo,” said André Lapierre, a professor of linguistics at the University of Ottawa. In the United States, “it is not appropriate to talk about sex or scatological subjects, so that is what you use in your curse words. The f-word is a perfect example.  In Canadian French, you have none of the sexual aspects. So what do you replace it with? You replace it with religion.”

So remember, the next time you’re in Quebec, try not to use the t-word.

It looks as though Ban Ki Moon, the foreign minister of South Korea, is in line to become the next secretary-general of the United Nations, but apparently not without another lesson in cross-cultural differences. 

The current UN leader, Kofi Annan of Ghana, is stepping down when his term expires at the end of the year and Ban is all but certain to be endorsed by the Security Council within the next week.  Interestingly, though, even among the world’s top diplomats, there seem to be ongoing battles to understand one another’s cultures. 

This article in the International Herald Tribune notes that Ban’s humility and soft-spokeness is interpreted by some as a weakness and by others as a natural byproduct of his Asian culture that has nothing to do with his leadership abilities.

Ban, 62, is gentle and soft-spoken and values relations with other people. Some call him a natural-born diplomat who can avoid making enemies. He rarely gets into arguments with hawkish lawmakers in parliament as many other Cabinet members are prone to do.

Ban has acknowledged criticism that he doesn’t seem strong enough for the job, but noted that as South Korea’s top diplomat he has dealt with such weighty issues as the international talks aimed at ending the nuclear standoff with neighboring North Korea.

“This has not been an easy job,” Ban told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “Sometimes I may look like a weak, soft leadership. You may look at me as a soft person, but I have inner strength. This is what normally people from the outside world would have some difficulty in seeing — people from Asia particularly, when we regard humility, a humbleness, as a very important virtue.”

If you want an example of how challenging it can sometimes be to communicate across cultures, I came across an excellent article that details some of the differences between the U.S. and Iranian styles of speaking.

For example, do ‘yes’ and ‘no’ always mean what we think?

“Speech has a different function than it does in the West,” said Kian Tajbakhsh, a social scientist who lived for many years in England and the United States before returning to Iran a decade ago. … In the West, “yes” generally means yes. In Iran, “yes” can mean yes, but it often means maybe or no. In Iran, Dr. Tajbakhsh said, listeners are expected to understand that words don’t necessarily mean exactly what they mean.

The article notes there is a cultural concept in Iran that describes the practice of saying one thing but meaning another…

There is a social principle in Iran called taarof, a concept that describes the practice of insincerity — of inviting people to dinner when you don’t really want their company, for example. Iranians understand such practices as manners and are not offended by them.

Here is a good overview of how the two cultures look at language differently:

Americans are pragmatists and word choice is often based on the shortest route from here to there. Iranians are poets and tend to use language as though it were paint, to be spread out, blended, swirled. Words can be presented as pieces in a puzzle, pieces that may or may not fit together neatly.

Iran is far from the only culture in the world that communicates indirectly or by nonverbal means.  It’s common throughout the Arab world, and to varying degrees in Latin America, Asia and Africa, as well.  But rarely do you see a newspaper article that attempts to explain these differences in any depth, so it’s worth reading if you’re interested in cross-cultural communication.

Language is of course one of the most common obstacles to communication across cultures.  It often surprises us, though, when these obstacles crop up even among individuals who speak the same language, albeit in different countries.  There is a popular quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw about England and America being “two countries separated by the same language.”

Along these lines, there is a humorous piece by Marion McKeone in the NY Times Sunday magazine about the differences between Irish and American English.  An excerpt:

Some time ago, my sister spent several months working as an au pair for a wealthy family in Denver. … Her first lesson (in American English) came on Christmas morning. The grandmother and family matriarch handed her an envelope … My sister, who was making the standard $50-a-week au pair’s pittance, opened the envelope and found it thick with $20 bills. Fifty of them, to be precise. “Oh, no,” she protested. “I can’t accept this. No. No, really. It’s far too generous.”

Grandma looked at her quizzically. “If you say so,” she responded. Without further ado, she repossessed the envelope, removed a single $20 bill and handed it to her instead. “Is this about right?” she asked.

Helene swallowed her bile, bit her tongue and nodded mutely as she uttered silent curses. She had been speaking Irish, and Grandma had been speaking American. My sister’s refusal of the money was meant to convey her gratitude and acceptance of the gift. You might think a simple “Thank you” would have done the job a lot more efficiently. But we Irish just can’t say yes. Or no. It’s not in our genes. …

For Americans, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The idea is to get the point across, not fashion it into a pair of earrings. But we Irish are more interested in the journey than the destination …

Some cross-cultural trainers in India are being asked to teach employees to be more direct in their communication style. This goes against the Indians’ traditional approach of being indirect, but it’s an effort to accommodate the Western business style and to continue growing the country’s outsourcing industry.

Junk the fake accent, young workers in India’s booming outsourcing industry are being told, and instead speak up, speak clearly and get to the point.

Indian workers are known to shrink from being direct with customers or bosses, a cultural trait leaders of India’s booming outsourcing business say must change if the industry is to make the leap from merely providing low-cost services to helping clients build stronger businesses. …

They are teaching “everybody to talk back and to be aggressive - that’s not a piece of Indian culture,” she said, adding that Indian workers are polite to a fault. Instead of telling a client, “there’s a problem with this file,” Thorne says most Indians would say, “Excuse me, I know you’re busy, but do you mind if I bother you?”