Should call-center operatives reveal their real offshore names? The issue has come up in a recent French ruling to ostensibly bring call center behavior in line with other consumer information requirements. Most data in English on call-centers naturally focus on outsourced call centers in India, and how well-educated English speaking locals are prepared to play Sandra or Roger for the likes of British bank account owners or U.S. insurance premium purchasers. And the language offer is widening. According to this report, some Indian operatives may soon be switching their names to Sabine or Reinhardt:

Courtesy a recent decision of the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC), even students studying information technology at engineering colleges can now learn German at ESC-recognized institutions by paying just 50 per cent of the course fee, subject to a ceiling of Rupees 12,000.

This scheme would be applicable at 11 German-training institutions in Bengal.

“The decision to extend the benefits of the language-related market access facilitation initiative to even students interested in German stems from our desire to help them become more employable,” a ESC official said.

In the French case, the new ruling (from Finance Minister Nicholas Sarkozy) was mooted in April and turned into a decree last week. The first two Articles say: “All goods and service suppliers who use a call center to issue or receive phone communications must inform callers of the geographical locale of the call center. This information must be provided at the beginning of the call and feature on all marketing collateral giving the coordinates of the center. Single calls to multiple call center geographies must also be declared.”

In other words, when you ring in France at night these days to change your mobile phone account, there is every likelihood that you will talk to Monique (aka Rim) in Casablanca, Morocco, Michel (or Hedi) in a suburb of Tunis, or Robert (or Mamadou) in Dakar, Senegal. Many call centers switch their night and weekend services to offshore locations in North or West Africa, where French is widely (and well) spoken and labor cheaper. If the Sarkozy ruling goes through, Rim, Hedi and Mamadou will have to identify themselves to each caller. Presumably the idea behind this is that French citizens will be so outraged that they are not speaking to real Monique & Co that they will switch to a service that promotes the authentic Gallicity of their call center. Which will in turn mean keeping or creating more jobs in France, and put the brakes on what the French call ‘délocalisations’ or offshoring.

As in India, call centers in Africa are considered a growth industry, providing job outlets for educated young adults who are hitting the glass ceiling of custom, under investment, and unfair work practices in oppressive regimes. Obviously these people are a source of cheaper labor for French firms (Moroccan women are often used by publishers and other companies needing large-scale text and data inputting jobs performed by French-speaking operatives), yet according to Le Monde, there are far more call centers in France (205,000 jobs and 3,300 call centers) than in Africa, which only gets 5% of France’s call center traffic. So the real effect of this new ruling is hard to guess at, beyond the consumer transparency issue. Especially when a France-located call center probably employs plenty of operatives whyose real names are Mohamed and Mounira already, call centers being one way for the ‘children of immigration’ as they are called to find a job in a country where unemployment is still stuck at around 9.5%.

Most of the comment in France and in North Africa (here, here and here) draws attention to the confused message this ruling gives the consumer – will my call cost more because I hear Habib say he’s in Tunis? – and the faint effluvium of racism implicit in the ‘identify yourself’ requirement.

The United Kingdom is usually roundly mocked as Europe’s multilingual dunce. And we know why. However, the UK government’s brand new MyBusinessRates website illustrates an interesting trend in what we could call the U.K.’s ’domestic localization’ – localizing to minority languages in specific locations.

This Rates site is designed to offer one-stop access to, well the ‘rates’ (or local taxes) that businesses have to pay. What’s interesting about it is that it has been launched in 10 languages – from Czech, Arabic and Soomaali, to French, Albanian and Russian – in compliance with UK accessibility standards that government websites seem to be spearheading. This is a national site, and with its localization repertoire, presumably addresses the strategic languages of business ownership in the UK.

This gradual shift towards greater accessibility for citizens, using localization, display technology and the like, almost certainly began as a response to very local needs. Take Haringey Council, the local authority for the London suburb that fields the Spurs football team. Earlier this summer it went online with a six-language spread, including Kurdish and Turkish. If you drill down, you naturally end up with English language content etc, but the thrust seems to be in the right direction, and the language range suggests that localization is a genuine budget item. It also proves that those advertisements back in the late 1990s promoting London as Europe’s most multilingual city, with over a hundred tongues blooming on street corners and in back-offices, were on the mark.

But the domestic localization effort goes beyond London. If you check out the website for say the Western England city of Bristol, you will not find a localized site, but the offer of city hall information services in 10 core languages (Bengali, Chinese, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Polish, Punjabi, Somali, Urdu and Vietnamese), all European languages, and “other languages such as Farsi, Pashto, Albanian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Asian and African languages.”

This UK localization wave naturally needs benchmarking carefully against comparable efforts in other European cities. This could then generate a score card for localized e-services to EU citizens, and over time prepare the continent for effective e-democracy (voting, etc.), where the question of providing online language availability/ translation would have to be thrashed out in all countries. It would also be necessary to inquire more deeply into localization processes as work on these sites, and how local government is able to budget for them and take them on board.

From a rapid scan, France will not yet be tiptoeing down the domestic localization path – ici on parle français. Spain is already multilingual by definition, but on top of regional locales there is a fairly high rate of immigration by people speaking Arabic, Romanian, English, French, Russian, Chinese, Croatian, Ukrainian, Armenian, as well as African and Indian languages such as Pular, Wolof and Urdu. The region of Valencia, for example, has set up a 24 hour interpreting service to handle various incidents and problems. But website localization remain limited in scope to European languages. The same goes for Germany, where Frankfurt and Berlin provide German and English only. Finland’s Helsinki city hall site is in Finnish, Swedish, French, German, Russian and English, but it seems to be a more tourism oriented site. In Denmark, Københavns Kommune, the capital’s city hall, only has an English option, as does Holland’s Rotterdam, despite the fact that these countries (along with Sweden and Germany) host numerous Asian, Middle-Eastern and African residents who would probably like to be informed (if second class) citizens. Is anyone out there monitoring government/local authority sites for language accessibility?