Travel Tips: Communication Strategies in No- English Spoken Countries
There are three basic ways to “make your way”, as the race directions always say, to where you want to go, if you can’t recognize or reproduce either written or spoken language:
1. Find someone who speaks or reads your language, and get them to take you or lead you where you want to go (or tell a taxi driver where to take you), or keep finding people who speak or read your language to help you along at each juncture (which direction to walk, where and in which direction to turn, where to get on the bus, which bus to get on, when to get off the bus, and so forth). This seems to be racers’ main recourse, but it doesn’t work well unless a high proportion of local people speak or read your language. If you rely on finding someone who speaks English each time you aren’t sure which way to turn, you won’t get there very quickly or efficiently, and you can get stuck if possible routes diverge at a spot where no one around speaks your language.
2. Find your destination on a map, and show people that spot on the map. No words are necessary: a foreigner pointing to a spot on a map will be presumed to be trying to get to that place, and will (in some fashion) be given directions or assistance — by anyone who can read the map — without needing to say a word. If you can’t find a bilingual map, it helps to have both an English-language and a Chinese map: once you or your informant locates a place on one of the maps, its usually possible to correlate enough landmarks on both maps to transpose the location to the other map. You’ll have much more success getting Chinese passers-by to point you in the right direction if you show them a Chinese or bilingual map with your destination marked than if you show them where you want to go on an English-only map. Even a Chinese-only map can be useful: once someone figures out where you are trying to go, and marks it on the Chinese map, you can keep showing the marked map to other people to keep steering you along the way. It isn’t clear, given the way the television show is edited, whether or how often the racers attempted this, or whether they realized the value of having Chinese-langauage or bilingual maps.
3. Find someone who speaks or reads your language, and get them to write down the place name and/or address (and, if possible, directions for how to get there) in Chinese or the local language, and show this writing to other people. This is actually the most effective strategy in such a place, but it’s the one the racers don’t appear to have figured out. It’s a lot easier and quicker to find someone before you start — a clerk in a nearby hotel or business, for example — who understands enough English to understand where you want to go, and write it down in Chinese for a taxi driver to read, than to find a taxi driver who speaks English. Once you’ve gotten one person to write down your destination in Chinese, you can get further assistance from any number of additional people along your route, even if they don’t speak or read any English at all.
Source: hasbrouck.org
Filed under: Travel, Asia, Travel Guides