In Beijing, it’s hard to get away from the Olympic improvements. I think the changes are somewhere between using the good china for company, and completely reinventing your wardrobe, habits and personality to attract some guy from history class. Not that I ever did that I’m seeing more and more English around town, and English-language menus, maps and information are supposed to be readily available in Beijing before the Olympics. Unfortunately, I’m afraid these Chinglish attempts will cause more confusion.

English is an international language. There are many languages in the world where English is the foremost of them all. It is understood and spoken almost everywhere in the world. English has become the key instrument of globalization. What is paramount today is knowing how to use the English language rather than just knowing it.

India now has the status of highest English speaking population in the world. While this is an envious development for other countries, fear that looms over linguistic circles is whether native Indian languages will finally reach minority status.

Chinese authorities appeared to have lifted a block on the English-language version of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, but politically sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen Square are still off limits.

Studies have proved that website translation is a good idea. There are various points that substantiate this statement. Often business people spend a lot of money on website translation. They build the websites with much care and spend a lot of cash to make it the highly visited website online. These websites will be receiving high search engine results and will be ranking high with the help of search engine optimization techniques. But still then you often see that the net result in the increase of profit from your business remains stagnant.

When you study the situation, you can clearly see that the reach obtained in the hearts of customers is less. This is because, to get more orders from customers especially from US and UK, you will have to speak to them in their regional language. It is a general trend that customers have a high tendency to go for a website that has their regional or local language. They might visit other websites, but may find it difficult to understand the offers given by the website. They then decide to place the orders in a local website.

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Assistant Professor of English Dohra Ahmad, Ph.D. calls it “vernacular literature,” spoken language put into writing, particularly language “generally perceived as having a lower status than Standard English.” It’s a subject that has so interested her that she has compiled and edited a collection of novels, poetry and short stories in languages that, she says, had never been written down until their authors codified “previously untranscribed speech patterns.”

Mr. Goddard, now a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, was preparing gifts for the members of his joint-venture team at the end of a successful mission to find a drug-manufacturing partner in China. He became enamored with an elegant leather-bound travel clock and couldn’t resist buying one to give each of his 11 Chinese colleagues at a celebratory banquet in Shanghai.

Mr. Goddard had done consulting work in China before, but he didn’t know that the Chinese word for “giving” is Song, and the word “clock” is Zhong, which sounds like a word describing the end of a person’s life. Thanks to that etymological connection, the gift of a clock in China can be construed as “a death wish.”

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