Please let me apologize for the long delay in posting. We have been busy at Hummingbird with accounting for our yearend. Also, with the Beijing Symposium around the corner there has been a rush on translation for some of the visiting participants.
We finished the translation of the Carpool Zone website, so very soon Torontonians will have access to all their information in Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Punjabi and Spanish, as well as English of course. This is a great example of a company embracing the multiculturalism in their city.
I still sometimes end up in conversation with people who feel that all immigrants “should just learn to speak English,” and therefore allowing immigrants to access information about a company or resource in their own language only impedes this process. Of course this gets me all heated up, but I try to be as cool-headed as possible when I remind them that first of all many of these immigrants do speak English, but for obvious reasons feel more comfortable, when getting important information, to read it in their mother tongue. And, on a side note, the Internet is already a place that can be quite confusing, how much more so when you are navigating in a language you may not have yet mastered?
Further to this, of course, is the reality that a number of immigrants are older and may not have the same kind of access to language programs that school aged immigrants do, nor the ease with adapting to a foreign tongue. They should not be penalized, as Canadian citizens they should have access to all the information they need in order to thrive.
So, without going on too much more here, it is great to see companies like Smart Commute/ Carpool Zone realizing that we are such an amazingly multicultural country and therefore offering their information in a format that is embracing, rather than alienating.
