The front cover of the tourist map of multilingual Macau Last week I had the privilege of visiting the University of Macau and in Macau I discovered yet another unique…
On 13 March, the research team made its first visit to Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) on Petchaburi Road, Bangkok, to seek support and explore collaboration opportunities for the Thailand-on-the-Move…
Chinese: What does the Chinese language mean to Western tourists visiting China? Ingrid’s blog post “Character challenge” has set me thinking about Chinese language learning these days. I have found…
Who of these two men do you expect to speak better English?* I am very much looking forward to attending the International Conference on Research and Applications of Intercultural Communication…
Bilingual signage in Lijiang: Dongba pictograms are in the blue banners (Source: Wikipedia) The next seminar of the 2012 series of Applied Linguistics seminars at Macquarie University will be held…
Pompei Restaurant, Karachi (Source: fcpakistan.com) A few days ago I had an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Having lived all my life in Karachi, I had until then never heard of the Pompei…
Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad) A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train…
Sadly, my sabbatical is drawing to a close and one of the things to think about now is souvenirs. My sabbatical involved visits to Germany, Iran and the United Arab…
Those of us in the broad area of TESOL often labor under the assumption of the invincibility of English hegemony. Whether they deplore it or exult in it, many people…
At 11pm at a Japanese ramen restaurant in Thaniya, Bangkok, a group of five middle-aged Japanese men and five young Thai women were dining right next to my table. It's…
Even a casual observer of the linguistic landscape in Iran will have to conclude that Iranians have a collective fetish for English. Almost all public signage is bilingual in English…
Space challenged Shinjuku, Tokyo (September 2010): Photo by Kimie Takahashi Tokyo is getting more and more linguistically diverse every time I go back there. During this trip, I was really…
As a non-speaker and non-reader of Japanese I went to Japan fully expecting to be confused. However, the only confusing moment I experienced had nothing to do with anything Japanese:…
I had been led to believe that Japan was a very monolingual place interspersed with Engrish ads, commercial signage and T-shirts. Well, that has turned out to be just another…
Chinese version of my recent blog post about orientalism and tourism 东方主义,这种西方文化中对东方文化及人文的旧式及带有偏见的理解,可谓是由来已久、根深蒂固。一日偶读澳大利亚旅游杂志《出发和到达》中一篇题为“爱情游戏,中国风”的文章,我对东方主义在当今世界的影响力,尤其是在旅游文本中的呈现,感触尤为深刻。 乍看标题“爱情游戏,中国风”,觉得有趣而有些费解:什么样的“爱情游戏”可以称为“中国风”呢?接下来的副标题解释道:“远离现代社会的纷扰,中国纳西族在罕见的母系社会中独享亘古不变的清静”。文中描绘的中国西南边陲的云南白沙古镇是纳西族的故乡之一。而作者描绘的方式却使得白沙镇成为代表整个中国的一个影像:亘古不变,陷入一个远离现代文明的永恒世界。 (more…)
Language-on-the-Move's recent blog post Orientalism and Tourism engages with the way ethnic minority people in China are represented in the West (and also by the Han majority in China). Not only…