TOP

American Culture and Fútbol: Globalization

Aug 31
Posted by Sean Oliver in American culture, General
“Translation” ; “World Cup” ; “Futbol” ; “Football” ; “Soccer” ; “Cross-Cultural” ; “Cross-Cultural Training” ; “Global Diversity” ; “Diversity” ; “Intercultural” ; “Intercultural Competence” ; “Localization” ; “Global” ; “Global Ethics”; “Globalization” ; “Global Business” ; “International Business” ; “Contextualization” ; “Cultural Adaptation” ; “Cultural Audit” ; “Global Delivery”; “Internationalization” ; “Inclusion” ; “Intercultural Training” ; “Global Cultures” ; “Global Business Skills”; “Global Workforce”; “American Culture”

Photo Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/shine2010/

In the run up to the World Cup, the American TV sports network ESPN, and its parent company ABC promoted the United States’ opening match against England with a zeal not usually seen in American markets.  Unlike almost all other American sports, the World Cup schedule for the group stages are determined months in advance, so while American sports media outlets only have at most two weeks to promote the teams playing in other American sports finals, the timing of the World Cup allowed for a marketing frenzy.  In Chicago, there were street-level advertisements for the World Cup, showing the logos of the various teams; on a bus stop outside of our offices on the North Side, there was an advertisement for the German national team featuring the names of their players. 

The World Cup always sees a flurry of “we don’t care” op-eds and articles in major publications, blog entries, and comments on internet forums explaining why Americans don’t like soccer, why it’s not in our national character to like soccer, why it has never caught on here, and why it’s just an inferior game to football, baseball and basketball.  Stephen Colbert, the “conservative” host of his satirical self-titled show on Comedy Central, devoted a large amount of air time to making fun of soccer, and featuring commentators to propone and defend the sport… but this year, a funny thing happened.  The United States vs. England match drew higher TV ratings than the Stanley Cup Finals (hockey), and the NBA Finals (basketball), despite both series featuring teams from large urban areas (Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Los Angeles, respectively).

(more…)

Read More
Tags: , , , ,
Comments (0)
TOP

Campaign Donations: FCPA says unethical but domestic laws say ethical?

Aug 24
Posted by Randall Stieghorst in Global Ethics

With the recent uproar around Target Corporation’s campaign donation to a Minnesota political candidate, it strikes me how oddly similar domestic campaign donations are to the many actions which are prohibited by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). How is it that giving money to a foreign official, directly or indirectly, in hopes of securing a contract or some form of business, is considered illegal and unethical according to the Department of Justice, yet giving money to a domestic official, directly or indirectly, in hopes of securing favorable governmental decisions, is considered legal and ethical.

Surely there are “hairs to be split” and very fine points worthy of debate as to how these two scenarios are different, but how can we label such similar activities with such different labels: ethical and unethical?

Read More
Tags:
Comments (3)
TOP

The Challenges of Hebrew (and other right-to-left languages) in Adobe Flash

Aug 23
Posted by Maria Fagrelius in Translation

Hebrew, as well as Arabic and Urdu, are written from right to left (RTL), as opposed to English and other westernWorking with RTL languages in Adobe Flash languages that are written from left to right (LTR). This poses a challenge for computer systems because they require a special bidirectional algorithm[i] in order to display these texts correctly. Software developers and engineers often find working with Flash to create multilingual content extremely difficult when translating into these languages, since Flash doesn’t have the capability to support RTL text flow. Most of our RTL Flash projects involve e-learning content, with the end goal of creating localized online trainings in these languages. The project flow consists in the following steps: 1. Developers place the translatable Flash files (.SWF) into .xml files, a format that is easier for the translation team to handle. 2. The translation team translate and finalize translatable text  as an .xml file and, 3. Developers then place the translations back into the .SWF files or Flash environment.

The process described above is not at all challenging with LTR languages, but it quickly gets complicated with RTL languages and indeed, Hebrew has caused some headaches for our developers and engineering team. The main difficulty is that Flash “wants” to read the text as it would read the letters in a LTR language, and when this happens the characters are mirrored or their order is swapped.  Imagine that you have embedded the word HOUSE as text field, and no matter how much you want to manipulate the text you keep getting ESUOH when trying to place the content into the source .SWF files.

These are some reasons our engineers often highlight as to why Hebrew takes longer than other LTR languages: (more…)

Read More
Tags: , , , ,
Comments (1)