EconomicsBrazil: Language skills: Tourism industries suffer from lack of skilled English speakers

It's a persistent reality of life around the globe today that English is the leading language, especially in international trade, business professions, and many scientific, technical, and medical activities.  It has largely displaced French as the leading language of diplomacy and statecraft between nations.  And it is challenged in its leading role by Arabic, Spanish, and most of all by Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese particularly).  Most trend analysts say the day when Chinese displaces English in the lead role linguistically, is not so far away.

In the interim, however, there's an economic aspect to the use or non-use of language that can affect a country's bottom line, it's balance of trade, and tourism, transport, and hospitality industries.  Rachel Glickhouse recently provided her analysis of the gap Brazil is experiencing nowadays between the arrival of tourists and the ability of the mentioned industries to provide the services that many needs and expectations of visitors to the country from abroad increasingly seek.  The same process will occur in North America as China's new middle-class begins to afford travel outside their homeland recreationally and wants to make a visit to Hawaii, California, or Toronto.  Will we be able to make the changes necessary in order to accomodate them and obtain the benefits of their arrival?  8–)

--  EconoMix, refWrite Frontpage economics & business columnist

Lost in translation: English in Brazil

Brazil is considered a 'low English proficiency' country, and ranks among the lowest in the world for workplace fluency, putting the emerging economy at a disadvantage, writes a guest blogger.

Christian Science Monitor (May24,2k12)
Ariticle by Rachel Glickhouse
— Excerpt reposted here by EconoMix

One of the main challenges leading up to Brazil's mega-events – including the Rio+20, the World Cup, and the Olympics – is a shortage of English speakers in key sectors, including tourism, transportation, and hospitality. For those who spend lots of time in Brazil and speak Portuguese or hope to become fluent, this is actually an advantage, which can allow for more immersion. But for one-time visitors or those dependent on English as their only language or the only other way to communicate outside of their native language (such as Chinese, Russian, etc), it can prove to be a problem.

On global English rankings, Brazil does not fare well. EF, a global English education company, released its international English proficiency index for 2011, showing that Brazil ranked as a country with "low English proficiency." Though it was among the lowest ranking countries, Brazil scored above the "very low proficiency" countries such as Panama and Vietnam. Released in April, the GlobalEnglish CorporationBusiness English Index ranked Brazil among the lowest in the world among countries with the least amount of English fluency in the workplace, which puts the country "at a disadvantage." An Economist Intelligence Unit report released this month indicated that Brazil is one of the countries that struggles the most with the language barrier in international business; nearly three-quarters of Brazilians surveyed said their company had experienced “financial losses as a result of failed cross-border transactions.”