Foreign Language Skills Could Make Invisible Idiots Out of BPO Companies

Filed in archive Outsourcing on May 21, 2007

When I was a student in the linguistics program at the Australian National University a story circulated about the man who wrote a computer program that could translate English into Chinese and visa versa. A user is supposed to have fed the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" into the program and gotten a Chinese equivalent. He then fed those Chinese words back into the program and the translation that resulted was "invisible idiot."

That was the early 1990's and I'm sure software engineering has progressed mightily...

The Rational Outsourcing Blog again today hit the nail on the head in regards to language skills in China. The blog post is named No Entrance to Greenland and shows a picture of an English language sign in Shanghai that should have read "Keep Off the Grass."

China has a solution to its language problem, according to Apu (who wrote the blog): throw money at it. It's an enlightening contrast to India's approach to problems, which is to throw people at the problems.

Confession time, I suppose. I studied Chinese, but as a general linguist. I can talk to you about tone sandhi in the Wu dialect, about dialect geography, about the phonetic components of many chinese characters, about the argument amongst linguists as to the number of tones Cantonese really has (is it six, or is it seven?), about the development of compound words in modern Chinese, and so forth and so on. But I can speak only half a dozen words or so of the language. Ni hao ma? Hao, Xie xie... That said, working with English language learners at the high school and college level has left me with a profound understanding of how difficult it is for students to master idioms and figures of speech outside a native speaker environment.

If China is going to throw fivebillion dollars at the need to learn English as a strategic move in the developing of an international BPO industry, hopefully they will be wise enough to spend some of it to send students to places where English is the native language and most of it to pay native speakers to come teach in China.

My thoughts, at least...