From the desks of www.santafehospitalitygroup.com
Hospitality Languages - Lost in Translation?
Anyone reading today's Wall Street Journal - Weekend Edition - Page W3 - July 24, 2010 -
"Lost in Translation", a full page article written by Lera Boroditsky, professor of psychology at Stanford University,
will likely come away with the thoughts - Huh?- these insights bring new meaning and potential interpretive issues to
hospitality venues employing individuals from a wide ranges of cultures and native languages.
If you relate to people who celebrate different cultures - it is an article worth reading. Personally I feel compelled to
read more - but am fearful that while this article is pretty reader-friendly and written in easy to understand terms - with easy
to comprehend examples of use - subsequent books and studies are going be a bit more challenging.
Haven't started the research process yet - but my guess is a lot of the material will be in less-than-reader-friendly languages
meant to be shared with scholarly populations. We'll see. If anyone is aware of books, papers, articles or studies that address
this issue in a meaningful and not abstract way - please advise.
Meanwhile - if you work with people from other cultures - and haven't been paying as much attention as perhaps we should -
to cultural language variances as simple as differentiating Up and Down from North and South; or left and right from West
and East... or any kind of variances and verbage that implies responsibility, timeliness and accountability - then perhaps you
should. It might explain some variables in translation and implementation. Fascinating.
Like most compelling, gripping tidbits of important information - this article is simply the tip of an iceberg.
For any of us who bought into Noam Chomsky's theory that there is a universal grammar for all human beings - and that
languages don't really differ from one another in any significant ways - turns out that may not be the case and certainly
merits some intense and further exploration.
So, next time something breaks on your property - and you try to identify who or what was responsible for the breakage -
and you simply receive responses of "the lamp broke" it may not be avoidance behavior or lack of desire to assume
responsibility it might just be a complex series of culturally based language differences - and the onus is on each of us to
understand those issues - as much as possible - and learn from them.
Fascinating.
