網誌分類：生活的沈思 |
The question "Am I being too harsh?" was hovering over my mind before I started writing this piece. But I finally decided that asking for better quality or higher standard is something worth doing. Otherwise, the slip will be never-ending.
I recently encountered 2 incidents giving me similar experience and afterthought. One happened at the end of last year when I asked an international US bank to mail something to an address in a non-English speaking country. I was repeatedly asked to provide an English address which of course was inexistent. What puzzled me was her explanation that handling address with special alphabets was impossible. I had no idea which part of the handling, namely input, storage, printing etc, was impossible. I took no interests to know the internal operation of the bank anyway. What I did concern was that the bank got the address correctly and had my documents mailed to the specified destination. If the bank system really could not input, store and print out any special alphabets, why couldn't the girl just put whatever was missing by hand on the mailing address?
The second incident was a remittance, again to a non-English speaking country. I went to one of the largest local banks which belonged to another banking group with the largest clientele in HK. (And that branch is located in TST.) The details of the recipient again contained special alphabets. I was again asked to provide English details. They told me about international practice of using English this time. But they didn't explain to me the usual international practice of turning non-English material into English. Instead, I was simply asked to provide the English version of my remittance details. The bank staff even told me that their clients could provide such English details for remittance to France, Germany etc. So I figured out that they just treated "e", "è", "ê" and "é" as "e"; "o" and "ö" as "o" etc. And my remittance was done and successfully transferred.
Maybe the bank staff in both incidents indeed had no knowledge of handling these cases. Maybe they were afraid to exercise their own discretion and experience for helping the client who had even less professional knowledge and experience about banking operations. If whatever the client provided made the processing unsuccessful, it was the client's own mistake. Maybe in this Asia's world city, we know the linguistic existence of only Chinese and English.
So that's why in a Chinese TV program, I caught the wrong spelling of "Bitte schön" in the sub-title. They of course didn't bother to put in "ö" either; probably because the system could not handle special alphabets again.
ex nihilo 2008-03-17 21:12
Everyone define the "world" according to their own experience which they yielded from their culture. But after the globalization process, the world was presented as anglophone free-market capitalist system, and for many Honglkongers it's a certain presupposition of starting to acknowledge the world.
We acknowledge everything in several ways and the socio-linguistic attributes of the perceived objects are the most significant features we discern them as familiar or not. Prejudices often occur on such level. This is, however, the biggest epistemic obstacle for us to learn the unlearnt matters. It is obvious that Hong Kong, as an international city, still seldom takes economic or cultural interactions with the non-english speaking "world" and feel lukewarm to introduce educations enabling the newly grown-ups to cope with needs in this way.