ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704140119
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WORKPLACE
SOURCE: ILANA DeBARE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
If you speak more than English, you may be able write your own ticket in many big corporations today.
Sun Microsystems needs a Spanish-speaking marketing expert for its Mexico City office. Anheuser-Busch wants a local salesperson who is fluent in Spanish. Cisco Systems needs an accountant who speaks Chinese, Korean or Japanese for work with Asian customers.
More than ever before, businesses today are looking for employees who speak a second language besides English - not only for jobs abroad but for work in U.S. offices.
So which languages are in greatest demand in the corporate world?
Spanish is high on the agenda of firms serving the growing Latin-American export market and the growing U.S. population of Latino immigrants. Mandarin is growing in importance for exporters trying to get a foot in the door of the mainland Chinese market. And Japanese continues to be useful in dealing with Asia's biggest economic powerhouse.
Today's hottest languages are different from those in the past - a result of changing trade and immigration patterns.
``Companies used to want predominantly European languages like French. Then there was a huge Japanese trend. Today I see more demand for Chinese and Spanish speakers,'' said Alison Richards, an international marketing manager with Intel Corp., who speaks fluent Spanish, French, Portuguese and Catalan and has a more limited knowledge of Chinese and Japanese.
The demand for bilingualism in business comes from two unrelated trends - the increased global presence of American companies and the recent surge in immigration.
For big companies like IBM or Bechtel, of course, doing business around the globe is nothing new.
What's different now is that even small companies are trying to market their goods and services overseas.
Lorraine Lam, one of 230 employees of Caere Corp. in Los Gatos, Calif. already speaks fluent Mandarin and Cantonese. But she's also taking night classes in Spanish so that she can deal with Latin American customers.
``My most frustrating experience is when I try to call one of our Latin American distributors and my contact isn't there, and the operators aren't bilingual,'' explained Lam, an international sales coordinator for the scanner technology company. ``They tell me `No esta aqui,' and I have a hard time leaving a message."
AT&T runs an over-the-phone translation service that can handle 140 languages, from Amharic to Yiddish. Demand for the service has skyrocketed from 400,000 minutes in all of 1990, to 2 million minutes in March of 1997 alone.
SimulTrans, a Mountain View, Calif., company, is a leader in a field that didn't even exist 15 years ago - translating and tailoring software manuals and other technical products for foreign markets.
It's demanding work: High-tech companies insist on issuing foreign-language versions of their products at the same time as their English versions. And the vocabulary and concepts can be highly technical.
``Sometimes even the English words have only been in existence for a few months,'' said Pauline Cho, marketing coordinator for SimulTrans, which has a local staff of 62 people and works with more than 1,000 free-lance translators around the world. ``We don't look for the rising star who translates poetry, as much as someone who can pull down a [software] menu and know what they're looking at.''
``It's evolving to a point where bilingualism will be the standard in customer service, especially if you're dealing in the California marketplace,'' said Erwin Furukawa, vice president of Pacific Bell's ethnic marketing group.
Despite companies' heightened interest in language skills, knowledge of a second tongue doesn't always translate into higher pay.
Pacific Bell doesn't pay its bilingual service representatives any more than its English-speaking ones. And Kaiser Permanente, a national operator of health care facilities, has considered a pay differential for its staff who rotate into translation slots, but hasn't been able to work that out yet with its labor unions.
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB