- Author: Craig Witt, Media post Columnist
This is a very important question that each business must answer in order to reach the highly sought-after B2B market. The answer is more complicated than you think.
Nuanced Expectations for B2B Customers
Because Hispanic millennials in the U.S. use both English and Spanish, marketers often recommend using Spanglish to reach them. However, this marketing is often targeted to retail consumers, not business buyers, and B2B communication is vastly different.
Companies are still experimenting with different strategies to reach Hispanic businesses in the B2B marketplace, but there is one lesson they have already learned: Hispanic business owners value professionalism just as much as any other business owner. That means that Spanglish, a very laid back and informal mashup of languages, may be inappropriate when communicating with B2B customers.
Your translated content needs to educate B2B customers on how your products and services can help them and how you can provide what they need, and it needs to do so clearly and succinctly. Casual language, especially hybrid lingo like Spanglish, can compromise the authenticity, integrity and trust that's so important to a B2B buyer.
Should Spanglish Ever Be Used in B2B Marketing?
There are times when a more casual tone can work in business marketing, but the important thing is to discern carefully when it's useful and appropriate.
If you have products or services that are targeted to young Hispanics — specifically millennials who grew up entirely in the United States — then Spanglish may be an approachable way to communicate with these audiences. Similarly, if you know that some of your users already strongly prefer Spanglish, you should continue to communicate with them in this way.
However, there are two important downsides to consider when using Spanglish for the B2B market:
1. Hispanics who were educated outside the U.S. may not be as adept at speaking Spanglish as those who were brought up there.
2. People whose first language is Spanish may not feel comfortable speaking Spanglish, so marketing in Spanglish can cause an immediate disconnect with these buyers. In fact, 34.2% of the U.S. Hispanic population is foreign-born, according to data from the most recent U.S. Census. That means Spanish is likely their first and most-preferred language.
Understanding Your B2B Customers and Their Language Preferences
Before you decide how to market to Hispanic B2B customers, you first need to understand who they are and how they prefer to communicate.
For the most part, decisions at Hispanic-owned companies aren't made by a single person; instead, they're often made by a team of people who speak varying combinations of English, Spanish, or Spanglish. Many of these decision-makers are upper-level managers who tend to be older and more conservative who view Spanglish as too relaxed for the workplace.
Providing information in both English and Spanish is a safe, professional approach that can ensure your content reaches every customer, no matter their preferred language. And you'll never have to wonder whether a too-casual Spanglish experience is turning off prospects and customers.
Source: Published originally on mediapost.com, Is 'Spanglish' The Right Way To Reach The U.S. Hispanic B2B Market? Maybe Not, by Craig Witt, May 3rd, 2018.
- Author: The New York Times by Perri Klass, M.D.
bilingualism is a relatively rare and a beautiful thing, and by “true,” I mean speaking two languages with the proficiency of a native — something most of us will only dream of as we struggle with learning languages in school and beyond.
Highly competent bilingualism is probably more common in other countries, since many children growing up in the United States aren't exposed to other languages. But the steps along the road toward bilingualism can help a child's overall facility with language. And early exposure to more than one language can confer certain advantages, especially in terms of facility with forming the sounds in that language.
But parents should not assume that young children's natural language abilities will lead to true grown-up language skills without a good deal of effort. Erika Hoff, a developmental psychologist who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and the lead author of a 2015 review article on bilingual development, said: “For everybody trying to raise a bilingual child, whatever your background and reason, it's very important to realize that acquiring a language requires massive exposure to that language.”
Pediatricians routinely advise parents to talk as much as possible to their young children, to read to them and sing to them. Part of the point is to increase their language exposure, a major concern even for children growing up with only one language. And in order to foster language development, the exposure has to be person-to-person; screen time doesn't count for learning language in young children — even one language — though kids can learn content and vocabulary from educational screen time later on. “For bilingual development, the child will need exposure to both languages,” Dr. Hoff said, “and that's really difficult in a monolingual environment, which is what the U.S. is.”
Pediatricians advise non-English-speaking parents to read aloud and sing and tell stories and speak with their children in their native languages, so the children get that rich and complex language exposure, along with sophisticated content and information, rather than the more limited exposure you get from someone speaking a language in which the speaker is not entirely comfortable.
Parents come up with all kinds of strategies to try to promote this kind of exposure. Some families decide that each parent will speak a different language to the child. But the child will be able to sort out the two languages even if both parents speak them both, Dr. Hoff said. “There is certainly no research to suggest that children need to have languages lined up with speakers or they get confused.” On the other hand, that rule could be a way of making sure that the non-English language is used.
If a child grows up with caretakers who speak a foreign language — perhaps a Chinese au pair or a French nanny — the child may see some benefits down the road in studying that language. But if a child grows up speaking that second language — Korean, say — with cousins and grandparents, attending a “Saturday School” that emphasizes the language and the culture, listening to music and even reading books in that language, and visits Korea along the way, that child will end up with a much stronger sense of the language.
It does take longer to acquire two languages than one, Dr. Hoff said, and that, again, comes back to the exposure.
“A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you're either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said. They may mix the languages, but that doesn't indicate confusion. “Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it's a sign of language ability,” she said.
Dr. Hoff works in South Florida, where there is a very educated and affluent population raising children in Spanish and English. “The children start out as baby bilinguals, but the older they get, the more English overtakes Spanish,” she said. “The ones who are successful bilinguals as adults are still much better in English than they are in Spanish — they didn't go to school in Spanish, they don't read books in Spanish, and when you actually measure the size of their vocabularies, or the grammar they understand, or the coherence of the narrative they produce, they are not as proficient as they are in English.”
Gigliana Melzi, a developmental psychologist and associate professor of applied psychology at New York University who studies language in Spanish- and English-speaking Latino families, agreed. “Parents will need to be mindful about introducing the child to literacy in that language,” she said. “They will need to be thoughtful about ways they will encourage the child to maintain the language.”
It's also important, she said, to watch the individual child and make sure the child is not overloaded with demands because of parental expectations and ambitions; maybe three languages on top of a musical instrument and a serious sport is just too much.
The languages you learn as a child are important, but so are the languages you learn later in life. “We all know people who make great contributions and do great science in English and are not native speakers,” Dr. Hoff said. “The human brain is amazing, and the human capacity to acquire language is amazing.”
So, what should parents do if they want to give their children a bilingual boost? “Find a native speaker and have that native speaker have fun, interesting conversations with your child, and your child will learn something,” Dr. Hoff said. “Don't expect it will turn your child into a perfect balanced bilingual, but that's O.K.” Whatever you do is an advantage.
Dr. Melzi said that often, a child who has been fluent in two languages in the preschool years goes to school where English is spoken and starts using English to describe what happens there.
“There is a push worldwide where English becomes like the lingua franca, so it's important that the child be exposed to the other language early, and the younger you are, the more native like you're going to sound,” she said. On the other hand, older children may learn more easily: “The younger you are, the more head start you have,” she said. “The older you are, the more efficient learner you are, you have a first language you can use as a bootstrap.”
So true bilingualism may be rare, but parents shouldn't be discouraged on that account, since all the skills that children acquire along the way are very valuable, Dr. Melzi said. “It's worth it, but it's a lot of work.”
Source: Published originally on The New York Times.com, Raising a Truly Bilingual Child, by Perri Klass, M.D. July 10th, 2017.
- Author: By Jens Manuel Krogstad and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera
Latino adults who are the children of immigrant parents are most likely to be bilingual. Among this group, 50% are bilingual, according to our 2013 survey. As of 2012, Latinos with immigrant parents (defined as those born outside the U.S. or those born in Puerto Rico) made up roughly half (48%) of all U.S.-born Hispanics. By comparison, a third (35%) of Hispanic immigrants are bilingual, as are a quarter (23%) of those with U.S.-born parents.
Widespread bilingualism has the potential to affect future generations of
Bilingualism is measured in our National Surveys of Latinos by asking Hispanic adults to self-assess their language abilities. Respondents rated their ability to carry on a conversation in Spanish and how well they can read a book or newspaper written in Spanish. The same questions are posed about their English-speaking ability. Bilingualism is linked to age. Some 42% of Hispanics ages 18 to 29 are bilingual. That share falls to about a third among Hispanics ages 30 to 49 and ages 50 to 64, but rises again, to 40%, among those ages 65 and older.
Due in part to bilingualism, in 2013 Spanish was the most spoken non-English language in the U.S., used by 35.8 million Hispanics in the U.S. plus an additional 2.6 million non-Hispanics. Overall, three-in-four Hispanics (73%) ages 5 and older speak Spanish in their homes, when including those who are bilingual.
Given the expected demographic changes, what is the future of language use among Hispanics in the United States? According to Census Bureau projections, the share of Hispanics who speak only English at home will rise from 26% in 2013 to 34% in 2020. Over this time period, the share who speak Spanish at home will decrease from 73% to 66%.
And as a sign of the times, Spanglish, an informal hybrid of both languages, is widely used among Hispanics ages 16 to 25. Among these young Hispanics, 70% report using Spanglish, according to an analysis we did in 2009..
Source: Published originally on pewresearch.org, A majority of English-speaking Hispanics in the U.S. are bilingual by Jens Manuel Krogstad and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera.
- Author: Frontiers in Psychology by Eleonora Rossi, Michele Diaz, Judith F. Kroll, & Paola E. Dussias
New research shows late bilinguals are sensitive to unique aspects of second language
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) – Imagine coming across a sentence in English that reads like this: “Mary apple eats her delicious.” For most native-English speakers, the sentence would likely strike you as odd because it doesn't seem to be structured in an order that immediately gets the message across.
It has always been thought that, when adults learn a second language, they face this problem because the grammar of other languages doesn't necessarily match their native language. But, a new study reveals that adults are capable of learning and processing a new language in a way that resembles native speaker language use.
In the past two decades, the advance of testing methodologies and revolutionary neuroimaging methods have allowed language processing to be studied in real-time in a non-invasive way, opening the doors to a better understanding of how our brains process linguistic information in two languages.
In the study, the team looked at how native English speakers, who learned Spanish as a second language as adults, understood sentences in Spanish that contained subtle aspects of Spanish grammar that do not exist in English. Participants in the study were already advanced in Spanish, but not native speakers. The goal was to test them on aspects of Spanish that are typically difficult to learn because they don't exist in the structure of English grammar. Errors were purposely introduced and participants were asked whether they could detect the errors.
“Counter to the long-standing assumption that learning a second language and becoming bilingual past early childhood is impossible, we found that English speakers who learned Spanish as adults were able to understand these special aspects of Spanish,” said Judith Kroll, a UCR psychology professor who was also on the research team. “The results suggest that adults are capable of learning and processing a new language in a way that resembles native speaker language use.”
The research team also included Pennsylvania State University faculty members Michele Diaz, psychology professor, and Paola Dussia, professor of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
The authors of the paper, published in Frontiers in Psychology, are part of a larger research effort between UCR and Penn State to study the bilingual mind and brain. The research is conducted in collaboration, and supported by a National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education grant. Future research by the team will target understanding how an intensive but short period of new language learning may shape adult minds.
Source: Published originally on Frontiers in PhycologyLate Bilinguals Are Sensitive to Unique Aspects of Second Language Processing: Evidence from Clitic Pronouns Word-Order by EleonoraRossi, Michele Diaz, Judith F. Kroll and Paola E. Dussias, March 17, 2017.
- Author: pewtrusts.org by Sophie Quinton
Maas is fluent in English and Spanish, but that gets her only so far. She often has to hop on the phone with a medical interpreter, who relays her questions to the patient and then translates the patient's answers. “It just takes a little more time,” the nurse practitioner said.
The future of American health care looks a lot more like the Salud clinic than Norman Rockwell's iconic small-town doctor's office. The country is on course to lose its white majority around 2050. That future is already visible in Sacramento County and neighboring Yolo County, where West Sacramento is located: by 2013 the combined population of Hispanic, black, Asian and other nonwhite residents had edged out whites. In West Sacramento, a historically working-class county across the river from the state capital, more than 2 out of 5 public schoolchildren already speak a language other than English at home.
Sacramento-area hospitals, community health centers and doctor's offices have had to adapt. They've hired more multilingual, bicultural staff. They've contracted with interpretation services. The medical school at the University of California, Davis, is trying to figure out how to recruit more Latino students to a profession that remains largely white and Asian. And doctors are being trained to deliver culturally appropriate care to patients of many backgrounds.
When a diabetic pregnant Afghan woman wanted to fast during Ramadan, the Salud Clinic's nutritionist recalculated the best time of day to measure her blood sugar. If Mexican mothers say they're rubbing gentian violet on their baby's umbilical cord area to keep it clean — a harmless natural remedy — doctors encourage them to keep doing so.
Similar stories are playing out across California, which became majority minority in 2000. Health systems are using new data tools to get a better handle on just who they're serving — and where the trend lines are pointing. County health departments, nonprofits and clinics have invested in recruiting and training bilingual community health workers.
Insurance doesn't always pay for the extra costs of services like translation. Patient visits take extra time, straining schedules for doctors and nurses. “You can't really help somebody if you don't understand how they value health, and how they understand health and the health care system,” says Robin Affrime, CEO of CommuniCare Health Centers, the nonprofit that operates the Salud Clinic.
Immigrants Drive Change
Most of the nation's population growth since the 1960s has come from the immigration of nearly 59 million people from foreign countries who settled in the U.S. in that time, mostly from Latin America and Asia, according to the Pew Research Center. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds the Pew Research Center and Stateline.)
Hispanic, black, Asian and multiracial babies in the United States already outnumber white babies. In three years' time, a majority of U.S. children and teenagers will be some race other than non-Hispanic white. And in about 30 years, whites will cease to be the national majority, demographers say.
A more diverse patient population may mean a different mix of health conditions, because some are linked to country of origin. People who were born in Asia are particularly prone to hepatitis B, for instance. African-Americans are more likely to have sickle cell anemia, an inherited blood disorder more common in Africa, the Middle East, India, and parts of southern Europe and Latin America.
Asians and Hispanics — the groups likely to drive population increase going forward — have longer life expectancies than whites. Hispanics are less likely to suffer from many chronic conditions than whites even though they're typically poorer and less educated.
Yet second- and third-generation Hispanic-Americans are often less healthy than their immigrant parents. One theory is that with assimilation, younger generations pick up bad American habits such as eating fast food and not getting enough exercise. And health continues to vary by subgroup. For instance, Californians with roots in Mexico are much more likely to be obese than Californians with roots in Puerto Rico, survey data show.
Health Challenges
One of the challenges facing health care providers is obvious: many new immigrants can't speak English. About 60 million Americans speak a language other than English at home and about 25 million can't speak English very well, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Salud doesn't typically bring in in-person interpreters, because they're more expensive. But it does contract with a phone interpretation service, a business that's growing rapidly across the county. The service provides real-time translation between English and at least 12 other languages. Interpretation of some of the less common languages, like Hmong, needs to be scheduled in advance. And there have been instances in which the interpreter speaks the wrong dialect of a language like Dari, spoken in several countries in Central Asia.
Often a staff member can help. The health center has doctors and nurses who speak Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Tagalog and Spanish, and has hired administrative staff and medical assistants who speak Hmong and Mien, a language spoken by some Indochinese refugees who fled to the United States during the Vietnam War.
But Mien has no written language. And some cultures and languages have concepts that defy easy translation. “There are some words where we really cannot use the translator,” said Rubina Saini, a Salud physician who speaks several South Asian languages.
Other clinics don't do as well as Salud. Under federal civil rights law, hospitals, nursing homes and other providers that receive federal funding must take reasonable steps to accommodate patients who can't speak English well. But the legal requirement isn't well-enforced and services can be spotty. “Where people need language services isn't necessarily where they're being offered,” says Melody Schiaffino, an assistant professor at San Diego State University's Graduate School of Public Health.
In a recent study, Schiaffino found that about 30 percent of all hospitals nationwide don't offer translation services. The share is even larger for public safety-net and for-profit hospitals, even in diverse cities. That's because the government hospitals can't afford to do so, she said, and for-profit hospitals tend to serve well-insured patients who speak English.
State policy helps determine who gets interpretation and translation help. Only 15 states directly pay for interpreters needed by Medicaid patients. California isn't one of them, although a 2009 task force created by the state Department of Health Services recommended the change. (California does require private health insurers to provide — although not necessarily pay for — language services. The state also requires health plans in its state Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, to translate certain written materials into common languages.)
Most Salud Clinic patients have a Medi-Cal insurance plan that will cover the cost of interpretation, Donna Paul, the clinic manager, says. If a patient doesn't have coverage, CommuniCare Health Centers absorbs the cost.
Then there's the need to navigate cultural differences. The front-office staff knows that Southeast Asians may be uncomfortable making direct eye contact, and that Russians may speak loud and fast, Paul said. They've learned not to take such things personally.
Ethnic Disparities
Treating a more diverse population also means confronting gaps in care that go beyond socioeconomic status. African-Americans, and in some cases Hispanics, tend to receive lower-quality care than whites even after controlling for income, age and symptoms, according to an often cited 2003 report by the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine). Black patients are less likely to be prescribed pain medication than white patients, for instance, and less likely to receive antiretroviral drugs if they're HIV positive.
There's no simple reason for the gap in quality, which still persists, although researchers say unconscious bias or stereotyping by physicians, cultural and language gaps, and even geography play a role. “Race and ethnicity matter, whether you like it or not,” says David Acosta, associate vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of California, Davis, health system.
To erase the gap, medical schools are adopting strategies to better prepare the next generation of doctors. One of these is to recruit and train more minority students. The second is to train all students to examine their own biases and be more sensitive to cultural differences.
In California, where almost 40 percent of residents are Latino, 4 percent of physicians are. Nearly 20 percent of all physicians in the state speak Spanish, but Acosta says bilingualism isn't enough. As a Latino physician, he says he's bilingual and bicultural, familiar with his Hispanic patients' approach to health, such as the folk remedies they might try. That kind of cultural match improves trust between doctors and patients.
Black and Hispanic physicians are also underrepresented in the physician workforce nationwide. Increasing their numbers could also help ease the shortage of primary care physicians, Acosta said, because black and Hispanic physicians are more likely than white and Asian physicians to provide primary care to low-income minority communities desperately short on doctors.
UC Davis launched an effort to recruit more Latino students to health careers last summer, funded by the Permanente Medical Group, a physician group that works with Kaiser Permanente.
The UC Davis program, called Prep Médico, is aimed at undergraduates from northern and central California and starts with a summer session at the UC Davis medical school. Participants get ongoing support from mentors, access to research opportunities, and help studying for the medical school admissions exam.
Once students reach medical school, they need to be trained to treat patients of a different race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation or socioeconomic status than their own. Twenty-one states, including California, have adopted health equity standards that help guide physician training.
But there's a debate over how best to teach so-called cultural competency. The concept is often presented to students like another task to master or acronym to memorize, said Jann Murray-García, an assistant adjunct professor at UC Davis' school of nursing. But it's not something you can memorize with flashcards. “There's just no way to master the complexities of other people's lives and personhoods,” she says. And recognizing one's own racial biases and stereotypes, and learning how to deliver good care despite them, can be a lifelong process, she says.
Crunching Data
Kaiser Permanente has turned to data, to make sure these new populations are getting the care they need.
For more than a decade, the organization has broken down its quality of care data by race, gender and ethnicity and used it as a guide to drive health care priorities, with a goal of narrowing health care disparities.
For example, African-Americans are more likely than whites to have very high blood pressure and — partly as a result — to suffer from strokes, heart disease and end-stage kidney disease. First, Kaiser's analysts figured out what the gap looked like for their own patients. Then they created a new set of instructions for care teams, informed partly by patient focus groups.
Among other changes, physicians were asked to prescribe African-Americans medications proven to be more effective for them. Physicians, nurses and other health workers took additional care to listen to patients, follow up, and nudge them to stay on top of their treatment plan. The effort has paid off: Since 2013, Kaiser has cut the high blood pressure control gap between its African-American and white patients in half.
Health systems can use data to improve their language services, too, says Glenn Flores, a physician and chair of health policy research at Medica Research Institute, a nonprofit research group. All it takes is asking new patients a few questions to check their English fluency, and noting what other languages they speak. That way clinics and hospital systems can arrange for in-person interpreters ahead of time for patients who need them and figure out which languages are essential when they are hiring staff or contracting for medical translation services. “Very few hospitals around the country do this,” he says.
Nationally, health data need to more accurately capture racial and ethnic subgroups, says Kathy Ko Chin, president and CEO of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum. The “Asian and Pacific Islander” category used by the U.S. Census Bureau, for instance, encompasses everyone from third-generation Chinese-Americans to Pakistani engineers to Cambodian refugees. People with origins in the Middle East have no U.S. Census designation of their own, and can self-identify as white, Asian, African or “other.” Without more specific data, it's hard to know what problems local communities have and what services they need, Ko Chin says.
California policymakers have unusually detailed data at their fingertips thanks to the California Health Interview Survey, conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers have been able to tease out findings that can inform better care, such as the fact that Korean women are much less likely to receive mammograms than Japanese women in the state.
Source: Published originally on pewtrusts.org. Health Care Adjusts to a More Diverse America, by Sophie Quinton, February 13, 2017. This story was a collaboration between Stateline and Politico.