Editor’s Letter

As I was perusing the Web in search of new shopping centre contacts in Europe, I noticed that many schemes had decided to embrace the concept of
the Global Village. Wanting to attract travelling shoppers from neighbouring countries and overseas, some centres featured a button showing the Union
Jack or simply marked "English" on their Websites. The mere vision of such a link got me rather excited at the prospect of being able to delve into a wealth of information in Poland, Russia or any other European land whose language I cannot decipher. The excitement was short-lived, however, when those links turned out to be mirages.
Much to my chagrin, the links led me to pages whose primary titles were indeed posted in English, but whose remaining text was in the language of the land. The shock was just as hard for my English-language computer to take, judging by the lines of symbols and rows of question marks that ran across my screen. The experience, which I went through on several Websites, left me wondering why any marketer would go through the bother of pretending to offer a bilingual site when in fact it did not have one. It would be like making up a spontaneous lie about having travelled to India without realising that the stranger you¹re speaking to has spent the last three years there and will know in a second that you¹re a phony.
It would be much better to stick to a shopping centre¹s true tongue and the offer a couple of contacts there who can speak a foreign language. These days, it is rare to find a centre, especially a tourist-oriented one, where no one speaks more than one language. Surely anyone interested in finding out more won¹t mind sending off a few email queries. I certainly didn¹t.
It's one thing to want to be worldly. But covering the basics of good PR representation might be more important.

Myriam Beaugé

Editor in Chief