Building Bridges in Vancouver Communication spans cultures - multicultural aspects of business and training in British Columbia

Training & Development, May, 2001 by Haidee E. Allerton

Ho notes, "The Vancouver Chinese community is made up of people from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. Those groups are very different; they don't even speak the same dialects. So, you have to have cultural sensitivity to that. It can be costly to address each group and try to do something uniform across all three groups without intimidating one."

He adds, "Every Canadian company has to look into [cross-cultural training] because of our multicultural belief. The message is, Welcome to Canada, you can be yourself But in the United States, it's more like, Welcome to America, be an American. There's a plus side and a minus side. You do have ethnic groups in Canada that don't have to assimilate that much. But even if a company can't [conduct a big program], it can make a gesture, such as putting up signs in Chinese in the lunchroom."

Ho is involved with the Vancouver Asian Heritage Society. "Everything that we do is originally from Asia, but we're establishing a common ground looking at different art and cultural forms that can be understood by all cultural groups." On the table in front of us sits the evidence of one of his projects: Kimonos Unlimited: An Endless Creative Journey, a beautifully illustrated book of exquisite costumes. In fact, many of the actual kimonos were to go on exhibit in the lobby of HSBC Bank Canada. Which brings us to Kim Toews, manager of employment relations at HSBC, whose awareness of diversity extends to her business card, which is in Braille as well as print.

At HSBC, the focus is on dealing with not only the ethnic diversity of its customers, but also disabilities and other differences. Says Towes, 42 percent of the bank's customers are visible minorities--visible meaning that it's teadily apparent. The bank develops its training modules in conjunction with the University of British Columbia. One training activity for bank employees involves playing Barnga, a card game in which no one knows the rules and no speaking is allowed. When you win, you have to move to another table, where the rules are different and you don't know them either.

Says Toews, "It teaches people what it feels like to be in a different environment and you can't speak the language. Participants often say afterwards that they didn't realize they'd been so insensitive."

And so Forth

Steven Forth's mind works at warp speed, I realize right away. Fortunately, he stops once and a while to ask, "Have you heard of that?" or "Do you know what that is?" Forth is CEO of DNA Media, a software localization firm dedicated to creating core business applications that are seamless across languages and cultures.

Forth provides a brief snapshot of the evolution of software localization: "In the 1980s, we started off with some pretty simplistic ideas about human behavior, about language differences, and about computer systems. We were just taking software and performing a fairly linear transformation of language and functions. That's basically what the software localization industry did from its start in the sixties up to the nineties. Then the Web forced us to change how we think about software localization.