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SEMANTIC PROBLEMS THAT AFFECT INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

Pinfan Zhu
Abstract The success of an international business depends, to a great extent, on the use of language from two perspectivesthe business writer and the business translator. Improper use of language conveys cultural blunders, offends users, leads to misunderstanding, and causes users to dislike a product or business. The improper use of language naturally results in business failures. Unfortunately, improper use of language also occurs in many aspects of business information, such as advertisements, slogans, product names, and instructions. Such errors are caused by business writers lack of awareness of a similar word that has different connotations in different cultures, or by their overlooking of the negative meaning of a word, a lexical form, and a lexical sound in the target language. Helping business writers realize this problem is of vital importance. This article aims at cultivating both business writers and business translators awareness of the importance of semantic implications of words in international business communication so that they will avoid cultural blunders or unnecessary failures in this field.

Introduction With globalization and economic integration gaining momentum, countries of the world become increasingly interdependent in fields, such as industry, technology, trade, agriculture, and so on. This development necessitates countless international business communication of all types and requires international business writers or translators to have a good understanding of cultural and language differences. Any negligence of the differences in these two aspects will lead to business communication blunders or business communication failures. Here is an example: Mountain Bell Company tried to promote its telephone services to the Saudis in its advertising. Its ad portrayed an executive talking on the phone with his feet propped up on the desk, showing the soles of his shoes-something an Arab would never do!

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With such a cultural blunder, naturally its business venture could have the possibility of being ruined. Another case shows such a blunder caused by ignorance of the cultural use of language: American medical containers were distributed in Great Britain and caused quite a stir. The instructions to Take off top and push in bottom, innocuous to Americans, had very strong sexual connotations to the British. Similarly, with this indiscriminate use of language, business communication failure is only too natural. These two examples reveal the main areas on which technical communicators or translators who serve a cross-cultural audience need to focus their attention. This article will focus on problems in using language at the semantic level. Words are the basic language units used for business communication, so business writers need first control errors that appear at this level. Words often reflect or assume cultural values, assumptions, beliefs, customs, and connotations, which differ from culture to culture. Weak awareness of these differences can lead to problematic business communication across cultures. As an experienced business translator, I have noticed some aspects in which the use of words can often go wrong because writers or translators are not aware of the semantic implications of the words, their lexical forms, and the lexical sounds of the words they use in the target language. A discussion of errors with these aspects can serve as a practical guide for those who want to avoid such cultural blunders when either writing or translating business for cross-cultural audience. Problem 1: Use Similar Words that Have Different Meanings in the Target Language A business communicator who either writes or translates for a crosscultural audience has to face the choice of words in the target language when creating text. However, word choice in a cross-cultural context is by no means an easy task. Because of confusing polysemies, homographs, homonyms, synonyms that differ in shades and stylistic features, and words that have different cultural connotations, inexperienced business writers or translators are liable to feel confused at times or fall into lexical traps unwarily. Unfortunately, indis-

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criminate use of words will yield unexpected results, such as being misleading, creating misunderstanding, being unintentionally offending, and failing to achieve the communicative purpose. An Italian linguist, Giacomo Devoto (1965) said, Words can be robust and flexible (in terms of meaning), but through misuse they can become deformed, stiff and temporarily sick (p. ii). But sick words only yield morbid language that can turn out to be a cultural blunder or lead to a business communication failure. A common blunder found in business writing or translation is the selection of a false friend from the target language that communicates an unintended meaning. False friends, as defined by Mona Baker (2005), are words or expressions which have the same form in two or more languages but convey different meanings. They are often associated with historically or culturally related languages, such as English, French, and German, but in fact false friends also abound among totally unrelated languages such as English, Japanese, and Russian (p. 25). False friends exist because of lexical borrowing. If Language A borrowed a word from Language B, then in one language the word shifted in meaning or had more meanings added, a native speaker will face false friends like preservative (English: ), preservative (French: ), and Prservativ (German: ). Unwary writers or translators are likely to commit false friend errors. A senior French interpreter said that he had witnessed such a blunder committed by the official interpreter whom the late President Georges Pompidou brought with him to London when Britain was seeking to join the European Community. The President had said--on television-that he well understood the emotional bonds between Britain and the Commonwealth. His interpreter translated liens sentimentaux as sentimental links. He should perhaps have said links of sentiment, but his actual words implied that those links were mawkish, false, or a blend of both, an undesired effect (Mayne 2007). How about the example of John Kennedys misuse of ein and eine in his Berlin message? A simpler example would be helpful and instructive.

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In fact, false friends also occur when using idioms or at a syntactical level. The Parker Pen Company experienced a case of such confusion when it was trying to translate its slogan It wont leak in your pocket and embarrass you for the Latino market. As it mistakenly thought embarazar meant to embarrass, the Spanish slogan was proudly displayed across Latin communities as: It wont leak in your pocket and impregnate you (to embarrass in Spanish is avergonzar) (Serva, 2003). False friends come not only from a different language but also from the same language that is spoken in different countries. For example, U.S. and British negotiators found themselves at a stand still when the American company proposed that they table particular points. In the U.S. tabling a motion means not to discuss it while the same phrase in Great Britain means to bring it to the table for discussion. Another blunder is committed when Coors put its slogan, Turn It Loose, into Spanish, where the same phrase was read as Suffer from Diarrhea. So, a false-friend expression can produce a negative communicative effect. To achieve the goal of avoiding false friends, business writers or translators need to avoid taking for granted that all cognates have the same or similar meanings, though most of them truly do. Second, they need to look up the words they use in a dictionary written in the original language. Bilingual dictionaries may have misleading false friends in them. Otherwise, referring to some reference books will also help, such as False Friends and True Strangers by Nancy N. Rue, Semantics and Pragmatics of False Friends by Pedro J. Chamizo-Domnguez, Dictionary of German False Cognates by Geoff Parkes and Alan Cornell, Les Faux Amis des Vocabulaires Anglais et Amricain by Koessler, and A Dictionary of False Friends by Robert J. Hill. At present, numerous translation websites and language websites are available on the Internet that provide abundant examples of false friends of English from different languages. A web site that has the first international collection of false friends is found at http://www.translation-language.org. By visiting these websites, business writers and translators can avoid using false friends in their text and greatly improve their communication effectiveness.

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Problem 2: Use Words Whose Sounds Incur Users Dislike Word sounds can produce problems. According to Stephan R. Anderson (2005), president of Linguistic Society of America, there are about 6,809 languages in this world. However, about only 80 consonants and 28 vowels are found in the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet issued by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) in 2005. What this means is that there must have been abundant repetitive uses of the same sounds to express different meanings in different languages or even the same language as with homonyms. Whats more, not all 88 phonetic sounds are used in some languages; some of them use only a small portion of them, like Japanese which uses only five vowels, such as a, i, u, e, and o of the 28 vowels listed in the IPA chart. In this case, the possibility of using the same syllables or the same sounds to express meanings in different languages is greatly increased. The point is that, if manufacturers give a name to their products in the native language but do not want to change or translate it into the target language where the product is marketed, they need to make sure that the product name does not sound like an unpleasant or inappropriate word in that target language. Otherwise, a business venture may fail because of such a blunder. Neil Payne (2006) provided examples of such blunders: In the late 1970s, Wang, an American computer company could not understand why its British branches were refusing to use its latest motto Wang Cares. Of course, to British ears this sounds too close to Wankers, which would not truly give a very positive image to any company. A Chinese restaurant in Hangzhou, China, prepares a wellknown soup; the soup is phonetically translated as Shitze. The term was the name of an Ancient Chinese beauty, thus having a very positive connotation in the Chinese culture. However, the name sounds like Shits in English, a very negative word. Who would like to use the soup whose name sounds like shits? Sharwoods, a UK food manufacturer, spent 6 million on a campaign to launch its new Bundh sauces. It received calls from numerous Punjabi speakers telling them

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that bundh sounded just like the Punjabi word for arse. Even though some words may not sound the same as similar words in another language do, like English Coca-Cola and Chinese kekou-kele, we need to understand that people using another language may still treat them as having conveyed the same sounds in their language, as they may not be sensitive enough to tell the phonetic differences with their untrained ears. They would think these similar sounds convey the same meaning as the phonemes in their words do. A phoneme, as defined by Trubetzkoy (1989), is a smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language (p. 132). A phoneme can distinguish meanings. Sounds that cannot distinguish meanings are not phonemes but are allophones or variants of phonemes. Noticeably, not all speech sounds are phonemes in a language. They may be so in one language but not so in another language. People tend to ascribe speech sounds they never heard as allophones or variants to the similar phonemes of their own language. For example, some Chinese people make no distinction between /d/ and // in English because the Chinese language does not have the sound //. Thus, some Chinese speakers make no difference between that and dat in pronunciation. If the two words are spoken to them, they think they hear the same word or the meaning of their similar words. Thats why some Chinese people think they hear bite the wax tadpole from their familiar sound kekou-kele (Chinese phonetic symbols), instead of tasteful and delightful from Coca-cola. So, do not think that the word used for ones product name will not cause any problem semantically in the target language because some difference (though not big) occurs in the lexical sound of the word. Problem 3: Use Words Whose Lexical Forms Causes Unpleasant Association The Latin alphabet is the most widely used alphabet in the world. Though some of the vowel letters have diacritics (example of a diacritical mark?) in some languages like French and German, the 26 letters are found in the most languages of the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. They are also commonly used in most standard Romanization of East-Asian languages. Languages that

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use a Latin alphabet include: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, French, Finnish, Gaelic, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic Scottish, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Walloon, and Welsh. Chinese uses Latin letters (Hanyupinyin) as phonetic symbols to tell people how to pronounce the Chinese characters while Japanese uses Latin letters to indicate loaned? words or also as phonetic symbols to indicate the pronunciations of kata kana. Vietnamese also uses Latin letters as their writing system. Additionally, there are thousands upon thousands of words in a language, so there should be millions of words in these languages altogether. The result is that words made up of similar or the same letters can be very easy to find in these languages. Whats more, we know words consist of a syllable or syllables which are phonetic representations of phonemes. According to Alan H. Sommerstein (1977), author of Modern Phonology, languages universally follow these basic syllabic patterns in forming words: Consonant (C) + Vowels(V), /V/, / V+C/, /C+V+C/, /V+C+V/, /V+C+C/, /V+C+V+C/, /C+C+V/, and / V+V/, though each language has its own peculiar phonotactic rules (defined by The Free Dictionary, accessed at http://www.thefreedictionary.com, as the set of allowed arrangements or sequences of speech sounds in a given language. A word beginning with the consonant cluster (zv), for example, violates the phonotactics of English, but not of Russian). We can see that the number of these patterns is limited (about 10 or so); so when millions of words use them, similar syllabic repetitions are inevitable. Furthermore, vowels are normally represented by vowel letters, such as a, e, i, o, and u or their combined forms like ai, ae, ao, au, and ou; and consonants are represented by consonant letters, such as p, b, t, d, s, z, l, m, n, or their combined forms such as th, ts, pl, tr, spl, and str. In other words, repetition of these syllables means the repetition of the letters of the Latin alphabet, and with the limited number of a dozen syllabic patterns that are used in about a million words, the similar or the same letter combination (words) is only too numerous to mention. The point is that when a company coins a word, such as the name of its product, or directly uses the name without translating it into other languages, the

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word may happen to be a word of the target language with an unpleasant meaning. In this case, the product, having such an ugly name and being disliked by the local people, will have trouble being marketed. Thus, the business will fail. The following are some examples: When Ford Motor Co. marketed the Pinto in Brazil, they discovered that pinto was Brazilian slang for small penis. Naturally, no man wanted to own a pinto, so Ford blithely changed the cars name to Corcel, which means horse in Portuguese. The car reportedly sold well after that change. American Motors tried to market its new car, the Matador, based on the image of courage and strength. However, in Puerto Rico the name means killer and was not popular on the hazardous roads in the country. Honda introduced their new car Fitta into Nordic countries in 2001. If they had taken the time to undertake some cross-cultural marketing research, they might have discovered that fitta was an old word used in vulgar language to refer to a womans genitals in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. The Swedish furniture giant IKEA somehow agreed upon the name FARTFULL for one of its new desks and had it sold in America. With a word looking like that the sales quantity would be not difficult to imagine (Morrison, 1997).

All the examples listed above show that imprudent use of words will affect international business as these unwarily-chosen words may happen to be unpleasant words in the target language and cause people to dislike the products because of their unpleasant associations. Conclusion International business communication involves the use of language, rhetorical strategy, and intercultural communication theories to accommodate the values, customs, assumptions, beliefs, and needs of the target audience. However, main problems often arise in fields of language as language is the main medium to communicate ideas and values of a culture. Words are the referents to our notions, feelings,

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values, and so on. Naturally, improper use of words conveys improper meanings and interrupts the communication purpose. This article summarizes the common problematic dictions that lead to cultural blunders from a semantic perspective. These blunders can include the choice of false friends that have the wrong meanings, words whose forms incur negative associations, and words whose sounds induce unfavorable connections. It also provides necessary analyses of the causes and the suggestions for avoiding these blunders. However, a single article cannot exhaust all the semantic problems that lead to international business failures. Still, the article contributes knowledge to effective international business communication and will be a help to both international business writers who write for cross-cultural audiences and business translators who translate for the cross-cultural audiences. Creating awareness of going the extra mile to avoid communication blunders can prepare communicators to enhance their own and their companys sensitivity to cultural language differences. References Anderson S. (2005). How many languages are there in the world? Retrieved May 20, 2008, from https://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/ howmany.pdf. Baker, M. (2005). In other words. London: Routeledge. Chamizo-Domnguez, P. (2007). Semantics and pragmatics of false friends. London: Routeledge. Devoto, G. (1965). Civilt di parole. Vallecchi, Italy. Hill, R. (1982). A Dictionary of false friends. England: Macmillan Education Ltd. Koessler, M. (1975). Les faux amis des vocabulaires anglais et amricain. France, Vuibert: Nouvelle ed. Mayne, R. (2007). Federalism and false friends. Retrieved Febru-

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ary 8, 2007, from http://www.taurillon.org/Federalism-and-FalseFriends. Morrison, T. (1997). The international travelers guide to doing business in Latin America. Alameda: Spectrum. Parkes, G., & Cornell, A. (1991). Dictionary of German false cognates. New York: McGraw-Hill. Payne, N. (2006). Cross-cultural marketing blunders. Retrieved May 27, 2008, from http://www.proz.com/translation-articles/articles/1909/1/Cross-Cultural-Marketing-BlundersRue, N. (2004). False fiends and true strangers. Michigan: Zondervan/Youth Specialties. Serva, S. (2003). Language: Translations for Global Research, (26), 1. Sommerstein, A. (1977). Modern phonology. Baltimore: University Park Press. Trubetzkoy, N. (1989). Principles of phonology. Oakland: University of California Press. About the Author Pinfan Zhu, Ph.D in Technical Communication & Rhetoric, is an Assistant Professor of the English Department of Texas State University. He worked as a business translator and taught as an Associate Professor in China for more than 10 years. His teaching and research areas include professional writing, international technical communication, visual rhetoric, and technical translation. He has been published in both Technical Communication and Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

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