Cultural Interviews with Turkish-Speaking Executives: Introduction

Cultural Interviews with Turkish-Speaking Executives is a compilation of brief video clips in which Turkish executives discuss cultural issues that are of interest to North Americans. The objective of the interviews is three-fold: First, provide practical cultural information about business topics. Second, the interviews provide vocabulary in areas within a professional setting. Third, these materials provide non-native speakers of Turkish with multiple examples of natural speech.

The creation of these materials has been a joint project between the Centers for International Business Education and Research at the University of Texas at Austin and Brigham Young University and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas and the National Middle East Language Resource Center at Brigham Young University. Professor Orlando Kelm coordinated the recording of interviews, the digitization of the clips, and the design of the web page. Thanks go to Hayriye Kayi, Abdulkadir Nagac and Omer Kanca at UT for their work in digitizing and transcribing. At Brigham Young University, Okan Cakir coordinated the transcription and translation. We also recognize Metin Atmaca for his work in video taping informants in Turkey. One note about the transcription and translation. We tried to transcript oral speech, with a few modification to make it easier to read. The translation is also designed to accompany the origianl Turkish, which sometimes isn't necessarily the most accurate way of translating.

Instructions to view the video clips

1. At any time you may return to this introduction page by clicking anywhere on the top title bar (the area with the cutout faces of the executives).
2. Under the title bar is a gray strip with the general topics of discussion: Negotiation Practices With North Americans, Stereotypes About North Americans, View By Executives. At any time you may scroll over these titles to see a list of the specific topics. Click on any of the topics to view the interviews.
3. Each interview topic page has thumbnail pictures of the Turkish executives, view their comments by clicking either on the thumbnail picture or on the executive's name. This will open a new window with the video clip.
4. The video clips are saved as embedded QuickTime movies. In the top right corner are three icons. Click [T] to view the Turkish transcription, [E] to view the English transcription, or [N] to view the video without any text at all. Start, stop, and pause buttons are located below the video clip.
5. The video clips may also be downloaded in MP4 format so they can be viewed on an ipod. In order to do so, click on the small red font.

Download PDF versions (right/control click) of the transcriptions and translations of all of the interviews:

Professional ---- Negotiation ---- Courtesy ---- Stereotype

Orlando R. Kelm
University of Texas at Austin