One World, Many Languages,
One Company, Worldwide™
A country dotted with castles amid forests, Germany is picturesque and saturated with history. While Germany is known for its precision, organization and orderly diligence, German literature and music are also filled with deeply romantic yearnings. Beethoven’s triumphant “Ode to Joy” from his 9th Symphony, written after he became deaf, communicates a dawning and resilient…
The Korean peninsula is a challenging topography of height and depth with caldera lakes and rugged mountain peaks, a landscape that has cradled a unique language isolated from other language families, a language with no known, verifiable genealogical or “genetic” relationship to any other language – a language isolate. Korean is that language, with hidden…
Russia is a huge, wildly vast and ambitious country that has impacted world history continuously with its magnificent literature, political intensity, and continuing economic transformation. Torn between an unrepentant and authoritarian oligarchy and vital yet volatile market forces inspiring an emerging generation of entrepreneurs, Russia is struggling to strut upon the world stage as an…
Originating from the Latin spoken in the streets of the Roman Empire or “Vulgar Latin”, Italian is anything but vulgar to the ears of English speakers or to anyone who discovers the alliteration and beauty of its lyrical cadences. A language of aural beauty, providing aesthetic pleasure, Italian was forged by Tuscan poet Dante Alighieri…
Slightly larger than the continental United States, Brazil is a vast country with epic beauty and immense natural resources. It is also the birthplace of the Girl from Ipanema, the archetypal beauty whose winsome walk has charmed many as she saunters along that shimmering beach so memorialized in song. Certainly she is symbolic of Brazil’s…
The deal making of the near future will very often be done in Chinese – Mandarin Chinese. While English will continue to be the preeminent language of business globally, at least for the immediate future, without question Mandarin Chinese is on the rise around the world as China continues to gain traction as an emerging…
With so many languages in the world to learn, and the accelerating rise of China as a global economic superpower, why are French and Spanish still so very important in the world of business? Certainly, French has been overtaken by Chinese, Arabic, or Russian? Hasn’t Spanish gone the way of the Spanish Armada? While…
When a Montreal executive and a Parisian colleague speak French in a business meeting, they understand each other. But the differences between their dialects can create subtle misunderstandings that matter in high-stakes interpretation and translation. For organizations working across French-speaking markets, knowing these distinctions is essential. French is a pluricentric language, meaning it has multiple…
Is a smile a universal sign of friendliness and understanding? Does a waving hand always mean, “Hello!”? The answer is no. Just like spoken language, body language varies all the world round. In fact, many travel guides devote small sections to body language – what to do and what not to do – in order…
Did you learn Pig Latin as a child? If so, like many Americans, Pig Latin might have been the first “second language” you learned! Somewhere between second and sixth grade, a child is asked, “Ooday ouyay peaksay igpay atinlay?” At which point, the exciting process of orienting the ear to understand it more quickly, and…