But, truth be told, my preteen life was showing signs of hope. I’d moved up in the world, no longer confined to the “retard room” with a thick stack of gray tracing paper, a gum-slapping aide and a hydroencephalitic boy who drooled constantly. In fact, I’d been placed into a gifted program, where I was instead encouraged to dream up inventions, classify rocks, and attempt socializing with a few other “special” youngsters. I was also scribbling poems, reams of them, for in-class recitation. Still, I was a gangly, left-handed thumb-sucker and a behavioral nightmare from a broken, chaotic home in an isolated town. I was also attempting to compensate, in the worst ways possible, for a learning hurdle which was initially known as “she can’t write” and much later revealed to me as “a form of dyslexia.” No way would I ever go to college. No way would I learn Chinese.

In 2010, most of us hopefully know that those who are labeled learning-disabled or behaviorally challenged- whether it be autism, ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, etc.- aren’t necessarily “dummies” or “disabled” at all. In many cases, it’s just the opposite. For instance, one family relative of mine has Aspergers, and while he may not be able to hold down a good job or lengthy conversation at this point in his life (although I believe otherwise), he can take apart your entire computer and put it back together again with incredible speed. He is, by some measures, a genius. So, it is 2010, and we are evolved, aware human beings now, right? Back in the late 1980s, not so much.

High school, as the saying goes, was torture. By eleventh grade I was batting straight Fs, earned the most in-school suspensions in my class, and had already enjoyed a vacation at a boot camp for troubled youth. Things quickly went from bad to worse. By senior year, I’d been kicked out of my father’s house and was informed quite directly that I would likely not graduate with my class- or at all…
It took one random person to believe otherwise- a retired teacher who single-handedly pulled me toward that diploma- and my life began to turn around. Under his tutelage, I developed new systems of learning in the quiet of a library while being encouraged to focus less on my shortcomings and more on my strengths. Against the odds, I graduated with my high school class while living independent of my parents and working full-time. Still, college was definitely not happening. And Chinese? I’d probably have better luck digging a hole to Beijing.

As life would have it, I made it to college- albeit a few years later than some of my peers and not without bumps along the way- excelling across the board while working as a bartender and writing tutor in Manhattan. The irony. It was in college, at a public university, that I decided to give the “Ivy-league only” Mandarin Chinese a try- a language that had appealed to me as kaleidoscopic symphony, an opera of angles and lines. And, much like the poetry I had grown up reading and reciting, Mandarin felt instantly right. It calmed anxieties, fueled curiosity and, within my personal framework of learning, made perfect sense. Sure, Mandarin was very difficult for me- I’m still struggling to learn it. But, I could never say the same about French. French was impossible. Eventually, I made the move to China and then, to grad school. In Mandarin, as in poetry, I had finally found my own path through memory, cadence and tone. Through the rhythm of a character.

Much like other common learning disabilities, dyslexics are visual thinkers who have a unique relationship to sound and an ability to perceive using all of the senses. Right-brained people in general are known to be visual-spatial learners- unfortunately, they are also the ones who most frequently live with negative labels attached to their minds. It is also often said that dyslexics have great difficulty processing language. But, if you consider it another way, that assumption would have to depend solely on the context in which “language” is defined. For instance, if language is conveyed in rhythm and metaphor- like it is in Dickinson’s “Hope is a Thing of Feathers,”- a dyslexic or other learning-disabled person may come away with a very rich and uncommon understanding of the poem itself. I would also argue that the same applies with Chinese- a language revealed in a series of logographs, delivered like a poem or a song.

If it wasn’t for that retired high-school teacher who had encouraged the exploration of possibility instead of insisting that I be and do like everyone else, I probably never would have made it to college. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t have made it to thirty. And, if it wasn’t for gravitating toward two unlikely subjects- Mandarin and poetry- I certainly wouldn’t have continued on to China, to grad school and… at some point in the future… hopefully…a doctorate. I love learning now. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this narrative a lot- it is one that has managed to define my life before, now, and after. In doing so, I often find myself considering the kids out there today who, even in 2010, may find themselves living under names like “learning disabled” or “special” or “dumb” or “crazy” or “hopeless.” Where will they end up? Will they all be as fortunate as I have been?

It is more than apparent that we need to boost our Mandarin programs in this country. But, who are the BEST candidates to actually grasp the language and stick with it? Is it the so-called Ivy League-bound Einsteins hidden away at $40,000 a year prep schools? Or, the overachieving math whizzes in Sucktown, USA? Or, could it be the kid with Aspergers or dyslexia or autism- the kid who thinks in pictures and remembers in pitch? I don’t have the answer, nor could I find a single study examining the correlation between right-brained, so-called learning disabled individuals and their ability to comprehend Mandarin or at least, their ability to like studying it (the second point- to like Mandarin- is very important). What if we threw those kids a few Chinese characters instead of simplifying their options both in school and in life? What if we gave it a shot, the old college try? What if we’re confusing ineptitude with aptitude?

Who knows what’s possible?

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Update 2/2/10

There appears to be some promise to my tentative conclusion. Check out this study from 1971, “American Children with Reading Problems Can Easily Learn to Read English Represented by Chinese Characters”. It is, however, the only concrete research that I’ve been able to find so far. Dissertation, anyone?

Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨)- Executive Vice-President of top rated Asia-focused multicultural advertising agency Kang & Lee, founder of a popular LinkedIn group for Chinese-speaking professionals, mentor to budding Sinophiles, gifted storyteller and a scholar in his own right- is approaching thirty years of connection to China. I sat down with Mr. Gitlin, who is currently working on a memoir about his early years in China, to learn more about a life transformed beginning with a Mandarin class. Part II of this two-part interview details his career in domestic Asia-focused multicultural marketing, his LinkedIn group Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives, the similarities between learning Chinese and American Sign Language, and what it means to shape one’s profession around a particular theme- China. Part I highlights Saul Gitlin’s initial ties to the Middle Kingdom. To learn more about Mr. Gitlin’s journey and a life transformed by China, read on…

Career Roots…
“[Following seven years in China] I was accepted at Columbia for my MBA, but deferred for a year to spend more time with a woman I had met in Israel, who later became my wife. I said to her, “I’ll come back to Israel and hang out with you while you finish your degree as long as you come back to the US with me so that I can do my MBA,” and that’s exactly what happened. I went to Columbia and did my MBA full-time while my wife worked on her doctorate in psychology here, and then I spent a couple of years doing freelance consulting work. At that time, I knew that I had to put down some career roots and that we needed to be in New York. The year before I came to Kang & Lee, I said to myself, “I’ve spent my whole career in marketing to Asians and I’ve just done an MBA focused on marketing and I love this career path but how can I do it without moving back to China?” At that point, I was married, my wife was doing her degree, and I had a son. That led me directly into discovering this world of domestic multicultural marketing and once I identified that as a career possibility, I made a beeline for both the agencies and the clients that were focused on marketing to Asian-Americans. At a certain point, I made contact with Eliot Kang, the man who founded Kang & Lee. He didn’t respond to me immediately, but quite a few months after I initially reached out to him, I received a phone message from him which led to several conversations and eventually an offer to join him as a member of the executive management at Kang & Lee to run strategic planning and corporate communications for the agency. That was in 1997. I then went on to build my career as a multicultural marketing strategist. Kang & Lee is the number one ranked Asian multicultural marketing, consulting and communications agency in the United States, ranked #1 by “Advertising Age” among all Asian multicultural agencies.”

Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives…
“About a year ago, I decided to get active on LinkedIn. My first thought was that using the site might ultimately bring other opportunities. But, I rapidly discovered that LinkedIn was a very useful tool for other things, like learning more about a potential business client and preparing better for meetings. So, increasingly I started to use LinkedIn during my daytime work. In the spirit of getting active, I looked into joining some of their networking groups. I noticed that there were a lot of “China” groups- there’s “Overseas Chinese Group,” “Chinese Investment Group,” lots of China finance groups… There were many China specialty groups. But, I was searching for something else based on the way I define my career and the way I work with clients across many disciplines. I was searching for a group that I couldn’t find. So, I wanted to build a group of people who really value an important definition of who they are professionally as being “China people” versus people of a specific industry or function. There is not a small number of people like me in the world. The common thread for the group had to be superior Chinese language skills and China work experience. I thought that such a community would allow a very vibrant discussion about China while providing fertile territory for career opportunities. [I imagined] that we could have open discussions on politics, Chinese poetry, current events, Chinese economy, finance, marketing, whatever. But, the group would be a way to embrace everybody who sees themselves as a “China person” regardless of what their functional expertise is. I could not find a group that already did that, so I established one.
I established this group called “Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives” in July 2008. I gave it a Chinese name (中国通) because I felt like the use of the Chinese language was something that I wanted to promote in the group. I assumed that I would attract non-Asian people, but I also hoped and expected that I would attract a lot of ethnic Chinese professionals both from China and from all over the world. The name 中国通 is typically a designation applied to non-Chinese who have exhibited some mastery of Chinese language and culture, although in my group 中国通 are also Chinese business executives; at least half of my members are Chinese nationals themselves.
Once we had critical mass, I could start to see the group taking off on its own; I was getting 15-20 people interested in membership per day. I take the management of the group very seriously. It is designed for people who have the skills expressed in the title. Today the group now has almost 3,400 members; it is the largest group on LinkedIn using the keyword “Chinese” in the title. In my group, all the members are qualified to be there and come from all over the world. They’ve all been screened by me. There are two exceptions I make for accepting new members. The first is that I will allow students to join the group if they already have China experience or if they write to me to say that they are pursuing a career in China. As part of my own offline career, I take the mentoring of students very seriously and I want to encourage people starting out to get bitten by the China bug. The second exception is recruiters. I will admit any corporate recruiter sitting inside a major company because they are interested in getting China-capable talent. It’s all about opportunities for the core group members.”

Mandarin and American Sign Language…
“I’m currently studying American Sign Language (ASL). There are a lot of similarities between ASL and Chinese. ASL is not English done with hand signs; it has its own grammar with its own rules and a lot of the question formation structures and overall syntax are very similar to ways of saying things in Chinese. As I’m trying to learn ASL, I find that my brain is naturally going into Chinese mode as I form sentences in sign language. Whether its the use of particles at the end of phrases that express questions or the way you use prepositions, there are a lot of things that feel very familiar to Chinese. The second thing is that learning signs for ASL is like learning Chinese characters. Some of them are very iconic and look like what they mean- which is the case with some Chinese characters- but most are more stylized and originally had pictographic roots but evolved into something more abstract which must be learned by rote memorization. Seeing a sign, practicing it and committing it to memory- this is the exact process of learning Chinese characters. You can naturally apply that process to learning signs, except that you are doing it with your hands instead of taking pen to paper. So, in terms of the grammatical aspects as well as the process for acquiring abstract signs, I feel very predisposed for learning ASL. That was an insight that I came into on my own, but when I started asking educators in the ASL community about my observation, several have said that this is known and has been discussed among academic circles. People who know Chinese have an easier time acquiring American sign language.”

China as a Career…
“It’s been twenty-nine years since I first started studying Chinese; [I just turned 47]. People often say to me, “how did you have that vision?” One side of me wants to say, “I’m just a smart guy.” But really, I came into it because of my love for language and it just so happened that I focused on Mandarin, the hot country, the big business opportunity. My language skills and my knowledge of China have opened almost every door that I’ve knocked on. If you look at my resume, you’ll see that I was involved in all kind of things. Some people think that I’ve really jumped all over the place- from the hospitality industry to plastics production to telecommunications to advertising. They ask, “where’s the thread here?” Maybe most people define their career in terms of, “I’m a banker,” or “I’m an insurance agent,” or “I’m a telecom guy.” I define my career another way. My career is defined by China, by Chinese, by Asia. For me, the industries are quite incidental. One of the things that I really enjoy about the marketing communications industry and more specifically, the role that I’m in now, is that I get to develop strong competencies in a variety of industries. I’m sitting on strategic issues for my insurance clients, my telecom clients, my automotive clients… When you work with some of these [diverse types of] clients over a period of years, you really learn a lot.
I am part of a generation of people- and I think it’s growing- who are not defining their careers based on a specific industry but rather on a strong and very important competency that can cross industries and disciplines.”

This concludes Part II of a two-part interview with Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨). If you’ve missed Part I, click here. Mr. Gitlin is Executive Vice-President of Kang & Lee Advertising and Founder of the LinkedIn group, “Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives.” To learn more about his professional background, please visit his LinkedIn profile.

by Greg T. Spielberg

Come the first day of school, roughly 600 Oakland County (Mich.) students will be tossing Chinese textbooks into their backpacks on the way to class. Over the past two years, the number of high schools offering Chinese has jumped from four to 23 out of the 28 districts in this Detroit-metro county. Seventh-grade social studies has been refocused from Eastern Hemisphere to contemporary China and “its emerging role in the world,” says Jackie Moase-Burke, the language consultant for Oakland Schools. These students are part of the growing number nationwide – from Chicago and Ohio to Washington D.C. and New Jersey – that should be able to translate “Welcome back to school” to “欢迎回到学校” by year’s end.

There are an estimated 50,000 Chinese-language students in the United States according to the Teachers of Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages Web site, a tenfold increase since 2000. In Oakland County, educators and local government are working together to promote a bi-lingual school experience – one that better positions students to interact with the world’s largest emerging market. “More and more, education and workforce development has been critical to business development,” says Chuck Holmes of the Oakland County Department of Economic Development.

The trend is not just in southeast Michigan. It’s nationwide. “There has been a sea change,” says Steve Ackley, spokesman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Nationally, Chinese programs in the US saw heavy growth, increasing 200% between ’04 and ’08. Nine years ago, the group’s national survey of America’s schools did not even include Chinese as an answer option (the language was part of “other.”) The council estimates that 5000 schools taught the language.

This significant uptick has been aided by China’s flourishing economic gravity, but also through assistance by both nation’s governments. In 2006, President Bush kicked off the $114 million National Security Language Initiative (NSLI), a program meant to increase America’s fluency in “critical” languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Russian and others. The NSLI provided funding for students seeking to learn strategically important languages, and with international relations dominated by the Middle East, Arabic was the overwhelmingly popular choice.

Thomas Farrell, former secretary of the State Department’s academic programs, says the fund (which also provides grants for teachers) was influenced by changing global economics as well. “I do think the impact that we were all experiencing – China’s economic impact and India’s economic rise – had a lot to do with the initiative.”

Since then, Chinese has greatly outstripped Arabic as America’s second language. A major reason for the speed with which Chinese is moving across the continent is Hanban, or the Chinese Language Council International. Officially defined as a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, Hanban is financed by the state and in turn has sponsored a noticeable portion of the States’ language renaissance. Chinese Language Council International sponsors trips for American teachers and administrators to visit China, pays for Chinese textbooks and finds Chinese teachers for American schools having trouble pulling a qualified instructor from the local area. Hanban also funds teacher-training programs for non-native speakers looking to sharpen their fluency.

Ackley, who’s attended the World Language Expo for the past half-decade says he started noticing the Hanban presence three years ago. The cultural promotion is part of a soft diplomacy meant to increase the country’s influence abroad. China recently began broadcasting its China Central Television satellite channel into the Middle East and seeks to do the same in the US.

In domestic public and private schools, Hanban is influencing Chinese-language teaching. More than 35 of the 350 or so private schools in the country source the group to find them qualified teachers through a program called China Connection. A Birmingham, Ala., school wanted to start an Associated Placement program but lacked the talent base (only 1% of the city’s population is Asian, much less Chinese).

“The program really allowed the school to begin where they may not have been able to otherwise,” says National Association of Public Schools Spokeswoman Myra McGovern, adding that less than a tenth of America’s private schools relied on Hanban to find teachers.

Galal Walker, director of the National East Asian Languages Resources Center at Ohio State University, manages his relationship with Hanban “tenderly.” The center’s mission is to bring Chinese language teaching into the mainstream but Walker says Hanban has frequently bordered on proselytizing for its country rather than helping to properly instruct Ohio students. He credits Hanban for becoming more efficient, pointing out that the relationship is a work in progress. For the state, there’s been rapid development. Five years ago, Ohio had seven schools teaching Chinese. Now there are 70 districts with more than 100 schools.

Proselytizing or efficient management, the results are starting to become apparent to Walker. “I spent 25 years saying we should pay attention to the Chinese, and now I sit in my office and get 25 calls from people who say we should be paying attention to the Chinese,” he says.

Many thanks to Greg T. Spielberg for contributing this article. Greg is fresh off an eight-month internship at BusinessWeek where he worked on reader engagement and as a reporter. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College and the University of Missouri. His journalism passions are building community and writing about the economic implications of cultural change.

Hillary’s U.S. Senate seat replacement, New York Representative Kirstin Gillibrand (otherwise known as Lu Tian Na) was the subject of an article, “Ni hao.  My Name Is Gillibrand, but Lu Will Do,” in this Sunday’s New York Times.  While Gillibrand’s Mandarin-speaking ability and her six month stint in China as a university student have been highly publicized over the past few weeks, far less has been said about the overall presence of Chinese-speaking government representatives, particularly in the Senate.  Apparently, Gillibrand is the “only member of Congress with some proficiency in Mandarin,” other than Taiwan-born Oregon Democrat, David Wu.  And, while Gillibrand has granted at least one short interview in Mandarin (the one that got her all the attention in the first place), her speech at the Feb. 1st Mott St. parade in New York’s Chinatown was entirely in English- a speech that she now wishes was delivered in Chinese.  “Next year,” she vowed.  I sure hope so.

Either way, I definitely like where this relationship is going.

You’re a veteran translator with some pretty big names under your belt including McKinsey, the Economist, and HSBC.  You’re now working as a linguistic consultant and partner at Handsome Translations.  Tell me a little bit about the business.
We are a translation service headquartered in Shanghai. From our mainland China offices and Hong Kong as well as overseas footprints, we help international corporations keep abreast of China’s fast-growing economy and make informed business decisions by breaking down the language barrier. Likewise, we are helping internationally aspiring Chinese enterprises communicate with their prospects and partners overseas in pursuit of their business opportunities.

The name, Handsome Translations, is fantastic!  How did you come up with it?
The naming process involved some brief brainstorming, with a primary focus on the power to convey our belief that business-oriented translations, like most other streams of this old practice, should always be effective in a business-like manner to produce a positive impact. That’s why sometimes we go a little bit out of the way to prompt/help the client to improve on the working of their original draft in the source language, based on our prior experience with the corresponding type of business communication. There is a pun in the name that exactly reinforces that kind of impact we emphasize.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics increased the demand for Chinese-English translation services tremendously.  Has this trend continued, despite the current economy?
I haven’t observed a reversal in the trend. After all, the Olympics occurred roughly 30 years after China started reaching out to the global village from a closed economy and society. The mutual curiosity on both sides of the language and cultural barriers is part of human nature. The corporations we focus on are no exception. These are driven by brains that are sharp enough but undoubtedly follow the same kind of curiosity, more often than not, when it comes to leads and opportunities overseas. Curiosity kills the cat, yet it feeds the translator.

Tell me a little bit about your clientele.  Are you working primarily with companies in the West who need English translated to Chinese or are you focusing more on China-based industries?
Geographically speaking, 70 percent of our clients are based in China, and the rest are overseas entities. If we look at the origin of the businesses, then the split would be something like 40-60 (Chinese funded firms vs. foreign funded ones).

Aside from translation and interpretation, you also specialize in foreign language service project management.  What does that entail?
We acted on a small number cases as interim project manager for companies new to the China market with an initial lack of experience and resources to manage their bilingual or multilingual corporate communications.

It’s been predicted that China will soon become the largest English speaking country in the world.  Based on what you’ve seen, is this an accurate assumption? China might already be the world’s largest or second largest country in terms of people enrolled in its mandatory English language programs in the education system, but when it comes to using English as a working language, I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon.

More and more Chinese are becoming fluent in English.  Despite this, would you advise English speakers to gain a good grasp of Mandarin if they’re looking to do business in China?  Also, how relevant is Cantonese at this point?
If you can afford the time, I would say a good command of your business counterpart’s native language would always put you in an advantage over your rivals because that knowledge naturally draws you and your Chinese partner closer. It is a universal human reaction in interpersonal relationships. Even if good proficiency is not possible, on the other hand, some survival Chinese would save you a lot of trouble in private life when you are in the country. Cantonese as a dialect is gradually losing the kind of prominence it enjoyed say 20+ years ago. In addition, the catching up of the mainland economy, closer ties and more frequent travel between the SAR and the mainland have given rise to a popularity of Mandarin study among Hong Kong natives. I should say the Mandarin proficiency of Hong Kong intellectuals has picked up significantly in comparison to Guangdong mainlanders, who read and write Mandarin fluently but still habitually shun it in speech in favor of Cantonese.

I was speaking to a guy from Brooklyn, New York the other day and could hardly understand a word he was saying- it was all slang!  Similarly, while collaborating with a team from IBM, I sometimes had a difficult time keeping up with the conversation on account of all the acronyms they use.  In your work, do you ever run into this type of issue?  How do you stay on top of slang, nuances, and specialized corporate lingo?
Yes, we come across a lot of them. The short answer is to know your customer by the business they practice. Luckily, my colleagues and I benefit from years of in-house corporate translation work shoulder by shoulder with seasoned business executives in a variety of domains areas, where obsessive jargons and acronyms were and are the norm. From their standpoint, it is a natural human and corporate instinct to resort to such internal conventions to save time in speech and writing. In a translatable text of a desirable length, the context often provides the translator some clues to what the expression in issue means. So often times you can at least derive a couple of “educated guesses” of what it is driving at (education by context). Where there is still a lot of uncertainty despite industry-specific resources and reasoning, or, for domain areas totally new to you, consider using the client as the last resort.  Of course, this is not an encouragement to shoot questions like a machine gun. Be systematic. When there is a large number of queries to make, prepare a list to save time on both sides. Often times, your client would be glad that you asked.
In interpretation work to and from Chinese, slang is less of a problem compared with dialects. I don’t think the issue of dialect is as prominent in English as in Chinese. But in either case, don’t be too shy to ask the speaker to slow down or repeat/paraphrase what he/she said. Used artfully, this actually often serves as a hint that a more formal wording pattern/accent (Mandarin when it comes to Chinese) should probably be adopted.

What types of industries are on the hunt for English-Chinese translation these days?  Similarly, what trends have you seen over the past six months?
Virtually any type of business might run into an urgent need of a translator/interpreter all of a sudden. However, we have witnessed an increased interest in translation services from IT hardware and software providers and green energy ventures, among other technology-oriented sectors. A nuance to note is that some active demand for the service is being subdued to a passive translation need when the economy is in a condition like this.

Much of the world places acquiring fluency in multiple languages as a high priority.  In the U.S., however, very little emphasis is placed on the importance of being multilingual.  In an increasingly globalized world, do you think that will change?
I think globally-minded people in the US are increasingly seeing the importance of the multilingual capacity. The Monterey Institute of International Studies in the US, for one, as a pioneer in degree-oriented language programs, has stepped up its recruitment efforts for some “strategic languages” it offers. This could be a sign of increased emphasis in the US on developing a reservoir of foreign language talents.

Handsome Translations is approaching its two-year mark.  What types of clients/projects are you pursuing now and what are you looking forward to in 2009?
We are putting more focus on small and medium-sized customers at home and abroad, since the entrepreneurship they embody is going to be the engine of our economies. A break through the language barrier, with the assistance of a translation service, could create remarkable growth opportunities.

There are many translation services available these days.  What sets Handsome Translations apart from the competition?
We focus on business domains that we know. We also concentrate on economic and industrial trends.  We try our best to perceive the market’s needs of language service with a personalized touch and try to avoid generalization based on peer experience/practices.

If I am a business in need of your services, how can I get in touch with you?
The best way to reach us is by email at: handsomeservices@gmail.com
You can also reach me directly on Linkedin at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/xiaoyi
Additionally, I am personally available by MSN: xiaoyi1999@yahoo.com
Skype: tiptoe-on-you
Phone: +86 28 88193927

Thanks, Yi!