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As anyone who has worked with TrueLanguage can attest, we are committed to helping you, and your business, communicate with clients and team members around the world. Our mission is to transmit your message and brand into any language you require, thus keeping your global team up to date on your latest decisions and standards, and ensuring that your multilingual clients experience the same enthusiasm and confidence in doing business with you as your clients at home. You speak to them, and we make sure they can hear you.
This is a wonderful thing… but what do you do when they start talking back?
As we said last week, successful companies do more than speak to their multilingual audience – they listen to them, and apply what they learn. Feedback is essential, from your global clients and your international team members alike. Yet feedback is drained of its usefulness if you’re not able to comprehend it.
On a small scale, this probably isn’t such a big problem. Let’s say your business has an office in Cairo, and you’d like to get an idea of the general state of things, take the office’s temperature, so to speak. Or you’ve noticed an irregularity at your store’s Paris outlet, which needs to be cleared up. In both of those cases, it’s likely (not definite, but likely) that you’d be able to get someone on the phone overseas who can talk the situation over with you. English does enjoy privileged status as a lingua franca, so an international branch of a company based in an anglophone nation will probably have at least one person on hand who can speak it. And if not, technology can help you, however imperfectly. But what if you need to receive and process feedback on a larger scale?
You call us, of course – we’re still here for you when you become the audience!
There’s no real secret to hearing back from those touched by your multilingual outreach. You can use the same tools as you’d employ to gather data from your team and clients at home: mass e-mails, employee and customer satisfaction surveys, webinars and video meetings, etc. Just keep us in the loop, and prepare!
– Are you launching a global survey or e-mail campaign? It’s important to consider the response phase from the very beginning. Should you come to us with one of these as a project, we’ll want to know about your back-end translation needs, even if it’s too soon to quote on them. How many contacts will you touch? How long will you be gathering responses? How many responses do you expect receive? The sooner you can answer these questions, the better. If we know that in three months, we can expect, in each of seven languages, 100 responses to six free response questions, at a maximum of 400 characters each, we can prepare your team well in advance.
– Consider consulting with us in the design phase of your source survey or e-mail campaign, too. Cultural knowledge plays a significant role in crafting effective questions, and in understanding responses. If a survey includes free response questions (as it should), answers from international respondents are subject to the same cultural tendencies that can tangle any communication. It may behoove you to phrase your questions in particular ways, and you should definitely prepare to read the translated answers carefully. For instance, as you can read here, American workers in collaboration with team members in India have often noticed that their colleagues have an aversion to saying “no”, and to expressing negativity in general. This is not always the case, but it’s something to be aware of – your respondents may be unsatisfied, but cultural norms may inhibit them from expressing this directly as stateside workers might.
– Remember the long-distance interpretation technology we have available, and can make available to you. Do you engage in video conferences with your assembled teams overseas? Book an interpreter for that question-answer period!
You put a lot of thought into how you address your multilingual base… are you ready to listen?
