Speaking the lingo helps

By JULIE MIDDLETON

How's this for making a difference? In the aftermath of the Bali bombings last October, Bahasa Indonesia-speaking Kiwi Phillip Taula was several times the only person able to translate crucial information for Australasian police and their Indonesian counterparts.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade heads in Wellington sent Taula to Bali to help to whittle down the New Zealand missing persons list, get the three New Zealand victims' bodies home and co-ordinate our donation of medical supplies. A friend, a member of the Australian military, was one of three translators helping Indonesian and about 120 Australian police to communicate.

The linguists were swamped: none of the Indonesians spoke good English and the Aussies had no Indonesian at all.

Taula readily agreed to fill in as a translator for the joint police operation, and admits he found translating some of the forensic language taxing.

"It was chaos [in Bali]," says softly spoken Taula, 33, who was on the Indonesian island for two weeks. "But I enjoyed it ... I was happy to help. It was good to be needed and use the language."

Learning another tongue pays big dividends - personal as well as professional. Multilingual people proffer the same benefits again and again: people, places become accessible.

To speak another language is to understand why people from other lands think the way they do; knowing their lingo is the quickest route into their culture.

Lateral thinking gets a boost. So does confidence - especially when you are mistaken for a local.

But New Zealanders tend to fall prey to the fallacy that English is the lingua franca of the global village.

It is a short-sighted attitude.

University of Auckland doctoral student Karin Speedy has found from a study of 30 New Zealand-to-France export relationships - France is our 18th biggest market and the world's fourth-largest economy - that our exporters risk losing out on valuable trade deals because they don't use French.

The worst offenders, says Speedy, are small and medium-sized businesses and manufacturing and agriculture-based firms.

"Fewer than half of French buyers of New Zealand produce have a positive attitude to New Zealand exporters because they are always expected to deal in English," she says.

Given the choice of a supplier with French and one without, 80 per cent would opt for a company with French-speaking staff, "because it's so much easier".

These findings are broadly applicable. United States-based Forrester Research, for example, reports that business users on the web are three times more likely to buy if addressed in their native tongue.

The customer's language is always right, and New Zealand's largest company, dairy exporter Fonterra, agrees. It has more than 20,000 staff in 130 countries, and employs people with Spanish and Mandarin, reflecting two important groups of consumers.

Consumers do tend to choose the company "that at least tries to relate to them in their own language", says HR director Glen Petersen.

Language skill on a CV, he adds, shows that "the person has thought about career paths, is a lateral thinker, and would be a good addition". Multi-lingual staff integrate better if posted overseas, and learn subsequent languages faster: "the hardest [foreign] language to learn is the first one".

Wellington-born Taula, who is of Samoan/Pakeha descent but understands little of the Samoan language, learned Bahasa after graduating from university with an honours degree in economics and computer science.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade put him through a full-time year of training in Bahasa Indonesia, the common language of the archipelago, in preparation for a three-year posting to the NZ Embassy in Jakarta.

He says he picked up Bahasa "quite easily"; it's from the same language family as Samoan and has some words - such as 'lima' for the numeral 5 - that are identical.

The language "opened up so many doors," says Taula, who landed in the Indonesian capital in January 1999, as the country grappled with the aftermath of civil unrest and economic free-fall.

He could not have done his job, monitoring and reporting the situation to NZ interests, without Bahasa.

He made about 10 trips to Timor in 1999 to monitor the lead-up to the ballot in which Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia; at one point he was in charge of ferrying around New Zealand parliamentarians observing the vote.

It was an historic time: "I never dreamed I'd get the opportunity to watch people who had suffered years of conflict get the chance to determine their own future.

"To watch farmers from the backblocks walk for days to get to a polling station, carrying kids and all sorts of possessions on their backs ... "

Speaking Bahasa "broadened my horizons and gave me a much greater appreciation of how the world works and how people live. It's easy to get quite a narrow-minded view of life if you just stay in New Zealand."

And to take refuge in English. "Language is power," says Taula. Illustration: GovExec.com writer Katherine McIntire Peters reports the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993 probably would not have happened had there had been enough Arabic-speaking CIA agents to transcribe tapes of Arabic telephone conversations containing vital clues. Similar accusations were made about the September 11, 2001, attacks.

And mis-translated ad slogans are legendary. The USA Dairy Association's "Got milk?" slogan became in Mexico, in mistranslated Spanish, "Are you lactating?"

In Europe, most companies require all staff to have a working knowledge of a second language - enough to clearly express straightforward ideas one-on-one - and Europe snaps up many of our language graduates.

There's no compulsion here to learn second languages, laments Raylene Ramsay, head of the school of European languages at the University of Auckland.

During International Languages Week last July, organiser Judith Geare said only 25 per cent of New Zealand's 450,000 primary and secondary students learned a second language, a figure that puts us well behind Britain and Australia.

Researcher Speedy and Ramsay support a policy to foster foreign language learning, seeing it as a plus in developing New Zealand's much-vaunted "knowledge economy".

"Without giving credence to the importance of human and social factors such as language and culture," says Speedy, "New Zealand risks limiting its growth outside the English-speaking world."


Days of rote-learning gone

It's never too late to take on another language. You've already learned one. And look how well you mastered that.

Put aside awful memories of childhood rote learning - things have changed - and your fear of making mistakes.

These days, says Auckland College of Education languages adviser Margaret Hardiman, the rules-and-rote-learning approach to foreign languages has been replaced by more realistic and interactive methods which emphasise speaking and listening.

Hardiman already speaks German and French, and this term, at the age of 53, takes up Spanish with her husband. But in lessons, adults new to languages often become afraid of making errors, with the consequence that they don't open their mouths.

"How to get over it is to keep in mind that communication is what's important," says Hardiman. "When you're learning a second language, you're not looking to be a native speaker. Learners often fall because of that - they think they have to be perfect.

"Just go forward and do it. It's not an intellectual exercise, it's human communication."

Forcing yourself to try confers other advantages, she says - such as the increased confidence to take risks.

And it's a fallacy that you can learn a language only when young, says Unitec head of languages Nick Shackleford. "Adults are better learners - they're more systematic and strategic about their learning."

The monolingual also miss out on the fun of learning another tongue. When travelling in the relevant countries, says Hardiman, "you're not relying on someone else's filter - and it makes your life much more interesting."

There is another way of putting it. A T-shirt seen on a languages student at Auckland University reads: "Monolingualism is a curable condition."