Language Trainers Blog

A new proposal from Qiu He, a provincial committee member in the Kunming, in the Yunnan province of China, has led to the mandatory education of local civil servants over the next year.  Because Kunming is widely known as a ‘bridge’ from China to South and South-East Asia, civil servants will not only have to brush up on their Mandarin and computer skills, they will have to master hundreds of basic phrases in five other languages.

Civil servants will have to attend an intensive schedule of classes after work, three times a week, sometimes until 10pm.

English is not the only language they will learn. “We will also learn Lao, Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese, as well as Mandarin and computer skills,” an official from the publicity department of the CPC Kunming Municipal Committee told reporters.

On-the-job public officials under the age of 50 in Kunming are required to master 700 daily expressions across five foreign languages including 300 English sentences and 100 sentences in Lao, Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese each.

Qiu also set out clear study duration. A report by Xinhua News Agency said that Qiu has required civil servants under the age of 50 in Kunming to master 300 English sentences, 100 sentences in Vietnamese, Burmese and Lao each before National Day this year. The Kunming Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government will organize tests to determine the standard of learning and will regard proficiency in rare languages as a requirement for promotion.

As much as I applaud foreign language learning in the workplace, I can’t help but think that this is a punishing schedule that may be a little too ambitious.  The languages are very different, and none use the same script.  I wonder if the students will be required to read and write these languages as well, or if the training will be predominantly spoken.  I will be interested to see how successful this venture turns out to be.

Full article from People’s Daily Online.

I’ve already mentioned how confusing business-speak can be, both to the language learner and the native speaker.  How often have you heard someone give a presentation and had no idea what they were actually talking about?

The Business Sentence Generator is a fun little application that uses a standard sentence structure and combines it with business-speak phrases and buzzwords to randomly create sentences worthy of the flashiest, most content-free business presentation in the world.

Here are the first four sentences it gave me.   It’s a little disconcerting how genuinely corporate they sound.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen…

From a historical point of view, the recent re-engineering necessitates supply chain integration.

Although…

In pursuit of unique opportunities, our burn rate is further compounded by considering a novel quality vector.

However…

Given the undue reliance on derivative materials, a transaction-enabled platform stabilises a tangible return.

In conclusion…

To proactively manage profit, our contingency schematic embraces our exceedance of standards.

Thank you for your attention.  Please sign here to allocate funds to my project…

Local council leaders in the UK have been issued a list of 200 jargon, or specialist, terms that they think should no longer be used when communicating with the public.

With more and more people unsure about their financial futures, councils have realised that they need to be more transparent with their communities.  This means that they need to let them know exactly what they’re doing, especially with taxpayers’ money.  And they need to let them know in plain English.  If someone is about to find themselves in worklessness (that is, unemployed), they should probably be told in words they understand.

The majority of people will have no idea what predictors of beaconicity, coterminosity, conditionality, or double devolution mean.  And when the people looking after your money and your town are throwing phrases like this around, you begin to wonder what they’re covering up.

If you think you know what seedbed and coterminous, stakeholder engagement mean to jargon-slinging  council types, take the BBC council jargon quiz.  I scored a sad 3 out of 7.  Check the full list of banned terms (unfortunately without translation into simple English) for more bafflement.

source: BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Councils get banned jargon list.

Learning business English can sometimes be much more of a challenge than conversational English or English for particular industries.  Students of English may be surprised that native speakers are also often frustrated by the sheer number (and often pointlessness) of new management-speak terms that are thrown around the corporate workplace.

In the office, everything from modified sports terms (’this project will be a home run for us’), to business clichés (’let’s think outside the box on this one’), to completely irrelevant analogies (’this company is a really cool train set‘) abound. Middle and upper management seem to constantly be throwing together mixed metaphors (’You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music‘) and making up words and phrases (incentivise, strategic staircase).  Is it because they don’t really know what they’re doing, don’t have a plan, or do they think that buzzwords will justify their overblown salaries?

Many of the above phrases are from a compilation of BBC readers’ worst examples of office-speak.  Read the full list to find out why one reader’s boss suggested idea showers instead of brainstorms.