Indians learning how to tone down accents
By Barry Shlachter
June 21, 2004
BANGALORE , India -- Unable to contain her laughter, an "accent-neutralization" instructor at a call center told of a recruit that evening who couldn't stop pronouncing apple as HAP-pal.
For eight hours a day over the next 16 days, instructor Sapna Gnakakan will work not so much to get her charges to sound American but to tone down their often-strong South Indian accents.
All faces are attentively facing a video screen with the image of an expressionless American woman intoning: "Calendar. Clock. Corn."
The workers, all in their early 20s, repeat the words with varying degrees of success. It's their first day.
"Not caahn," stresses Gnakakan, herself only 25. "CORRRN!"
In Weatherford, Texas, half a world away, a group of neighbors discovered this year that each had been dealing with Indian call centers on a particular week to handle problems with credit card accounts or appliance warranties. And they didn't like it. They complained of accents difficult to fathom, which rankled them because Texans or other Americans who need jobs could have fielded their calls.
U.S. corporations say the lower costs of outsourcing not only help their profitability but make them more competitive. In many cases, college-educated foreign workers can be hired for jobs, such as call center work, that their American counterparts would see as dead-end careers.
But as off-shoring mushrooms around the globe, so does the backlash from American consumers. Much of the public's focus has been on call centers, because that's where American consumers and foreign workers come together.
A few companies said they changed off-shoring plans as a result. Others are training workers to sound less foreign. And a cottage industry of private accent-reduction schools has materialized to teach young Indians how to better communicate with Americans, Australians, Britons and New Zealanders. One French insurance company, AXA, has trained a cadre of Indians to speak Japanese from scratch.
In other steps to placate U.S. consumers, some employers tell workers to use American-sounding names or to keep up with U.S. sports teams. Other companies forbid employees to say what country they're in.
A 23-year-old woman named Manasi Bhaskar Rao Sadashiva tells a mortgage applicant in the United States that her name is Carol Sisk.
She and the other agents, whose client is a Dallas-based branch of a major U.S. bank, don't deny they're operating from India. But they use names that Americans can get their tongue around.
"I tell them I am physically in India but can't give them my real name," she said.
It's cool to work in the four-year-old outsourced call-center industry, says Abhi Shekh, aka "Ricky Anderson," a 21-year-old who landed call-center work right out of college. "It's a good job, never boring."
He had to pass an "accent learnability" test, then learn American pronunciation -- rePREsentative, for example, not the Indian represenTA-TIVE.
"When we first started, it was compulsory to put on an American accent," said Narender "Nari" Rasan, 28, a team leader, whose plan to study in Canada was scuttled by the 9-11 attacks. "People thought I was from Illinois."
But not all call-center workers mastered American English, and experience showed that U.S. consumers were uncomfortable with the slightly off attempts. "Now we make sure we are speaking clearly," Rasan said.
Aside from different speech patterns -- such as, "Let me explain you" -- "Our thought processes are more Indian," says Ganesh Kumar, 29, iSeva's Bangalore operations director. "We tend to apologize very often."
On the other hand, some Indians are abrupt on the phone when talking to compatriots, saying, "Just hold."
Now they are instructed to ask, "Do you mind holding?" Kumar said.
The instructor, Gnakakan, is a bubbly young woman with an air of professional competence. She came to iSeva from another call center where she handled calls, sometimes from Americans irate over having to deal with an Indian who has deprived a neighbor of a job.
Even though her accent is more a mixture of British and American than Indian, "there were people who'd say, 'I don't want to talk to an Indian; they can't speak English.' That hurt me."
Across town, AXA employee Priamvada "Nin" Gajaraj speaks bluntly about life on the line.
"All night, it's click-click-click on your keyboard. We're cheap labor," she tells a reporter at Koshy's, a popular old coffeehouse in Bangalore 's main business center.
"We get a lot of angry customers because we're Indian, They'd say: 'India? No wonder you don't understand what I'm talking about.' If they yell at you, you put the phone down," said Gajaraj, whose ambition is to start her own restaurant but for the time being takes down insurance claim information from British policyholders.
"I mainly get the old guys. They're very nice, but deaf."
(c) Fort Worth Star-Telegram
June 21, 2004
BANGALORE , India -- Unable to contain her laughter, an "accent-neutralization" instructor at a call center told of a recruit that evening who couldn't stop pronouncing apple as HAP-pal.
For eight hours a day over the next 16 days, instructor Sapna Gnakakan will work not so much to get her charges to sound American but to tone down their often-strong South Indian accents.
All faces are attentively facing a video screen with the image of an expressionless American woman intoning: "Calendar. Clock. Corn."
The workers, all in their early 20s, repeat the words with varying degrees of success. It's their first day.
"Not caahn," stresses Gnakakan, herself only 25. "CORRRN!"
In Weatherford, Texas, half a world away, a group of neighbors discovered this year that each had been dealing with Indian call centers on a particular week to handle problems with credit card accounts or appliance warranties. And they didn't like it. They complained of accents difficult to fathom, which rankled them because Texans or other Americans who need jobs could have fielded their calls.
U.S. corporations say the lower costs of outsourcing not only help their profitability but make them more competitive. In many cases, college-educated foreign workers can be hired for jobs, such as call center work, that their American counterparts would see as dead-end careers.
But as off-shoring mushrooms around the globe, so does the backlash from American consumers. Much of the public's focus has been on call centers, because that's where American consumers and foreign workers come together.
A few companies said they changed off-shoring plans as a result. Others are training workers to sound less foreign. And a cottage industry of private accent-reduction schools has materialized to teach young Indians how to better communicate with Americans, Australians, Britons and New Zealanders. One French insurance company, AXA, has trained a cadre of Indians to speak Japanese from scratch.
In other steps to placate U.S. consumers, some employers tell workers to use American-sounding names or to keep up with U.S. sports teams. Other companies forbid employees to say what country they're in.
A 23-year-old woman named Manasi Bhaskar Rao Sadashiva tells a mortgage applicant in the United States that her name is Carol Sisk.
She and the other agents, whose client is a Dallas-based branch of a major U.S. bank, don't deny they're operating from India. But they use names that Americans can get their tongue around.
"I tell them I am physically in India but can't give them my real name," she said.
It's cool to work in the four-year-old outsourced call-center industry, says Abhi Shekh, aka "Ricky Anderson," a 21-year-old who landed call-center work right out of college. "It's a good job, never boring."
He had to pass an "accent learnability" test, then learn American pronunciation -- rePREsentative, for example, not the Indian represenTA-TIVE.
"When we first started, it was compulsory to put on an American accent," said Narender "Nari" Rasan, 28, a team leader, whose plan to study in Canada was scuttled by the 9-11 attacks. "People thought I was from Illinois."
But not all call-center workers mastered American English, and experience showed that U.S. consumers were uncomfortable with the slightly off attempts. "Now we make sure we are speaking clearly," Rasan said.
Aside from different speech patterns -- such as, "Let me explain you" -- "Our thought processes are more Indian," says Ganesh Kumar, 29, iSeva's Bangalore operations director. "We tend to apologize very often."
On the other hand, some Indians are abrupt on the phone when talking to compatriots, saying, "Just hold."
Now they are instructed to ask, "Do you mind holding?" Kumar said.
The instructor, Gnakakan, is a bubbly young woman with an air of professional competence. She came to iSeva from another call center where she handled calls, sometimes from Americans irate over having to deal with an Indian who has deprived a neighbor of a job.
Even though her accent is more a mixture of British and American than Indian, "there were people who'd say, 'I don't want to talk to an Indian; they can't speak English.' That hurt me."
Across town, AXA employee Priamvada "Nin" Gajaraj speaks bluntly about life on the line.
"All night, it's click-click-click on your keyboard. We're cheap labor," she tells a reporter at Koshy's, a popular old coffeehouse in Bangalore 's main business center.
"We get a lot of angry customers because we're Indian, They'd say: 'India? No wonder you don't understand what I'm talking about.' If they yell at you, you put the phone down," said Gajaraj, whose ambition is to start her own restaurant but for the time being takes down insurance claim information from British policyholders.
"I mainly get the old guys. They're very nice, but deaf."
(c) Fort Worth Star-Telegram
