A Decade of Web Usage, Global Communication and French Translators

Aug.04, 2010 in Internet

The medium for intercultural communication and exchange of information that has brought a new age in companies’ internal and external communication is the Internet. Speaking about intercultural business communication, the WWW integrates those types of means of communication that partly or fully replace old media and shape up the outlook of business communication. What are the main languages used in the communication between foreign and domestic customers? How do they perceive those languages? What is the role of English in reference to the other languages? How do websites realize plurilingualism? These are only some of the questions that arise when we talk about the language policies applied by companies to intercultural communication. In order to answer these questions we may take for example some international railway companies whose business existed long before the advent of the WWW. A German Translation, for instance, got suspicious once as a railway company in Germany would offer its domestic customers information on its services in German, but at the same time, the information that was to be found on the website was only in English.

In the mid 1990s the Internet and the World Wide Web became more commercial and even though today every company’s business is unthinkable without a website, in the first years most businesses hesitated to invest in them. Advertising, public relations, sales and marketing are among some of the most sought after customer services functions which are all included in the principle of electronic commerce as all other sorts of communication and business transactions. Catalogues, manuals, reports, brochures and advertisements are only some of the business text genres that websites usually comprise. Videos, slide shows, audio presentations and animation are among the other types. What nowadays is in most respects impeded by language seems to be information and communication, we cannot but agree. The ironic moment here is that when language is the last barrier to communication, a website that is usually accessible to people around the globe may be understandable to only a small circle of users, though in recent years the Web has pulled down all barriers to communication and trade. One should first decide on the target audience if he/she is to select the most appropriate language a website will be in. For example, only Portuguese speakers will be able to understand the language of a website designed in Portuguese. The audience of this website may be much wider if a English to Portuguese Translator renders it into English.

When going online, there were some problems for languages different from English at first, but this soon changed and now producing websites in other languages is no longer technically impossible or difficult. As the WWW had to have the capacity to serve the whole global community by meeting the demands and expectations of contemporary research, interpersonal communication and business, an organization was founded in 1994, which should provide the necessary technical equipment in order to make this possible. Different kinds of coded characters appeared which provided the means for languages that use different type set to English. The new solutions that the WWW has brought to intercultural business communication are connected with the further dimensions given by the possibility to add video and sound. This means that software is developed without the accompanying cultural characteristics, so parameters for different cultures can be set. For example, a French Translation can translate software parameters that can run for France with the French conventions, which means that international audience should not be targeted by selecting English as the only language of the Web site.