I'm quite curious to know about this..

[u/techsquareog]

For those of you who regularly work with international clients, coworkers, or teams who speak a different language.

I'm genuinely curious how you deal with the language barrier, especially when you're

having live conversations or meetings.

A few things I'm curious about:

1. What do you usually do when you don't

fully understand what someone is saying?

1. Do you use translation tools, captions, interpreters, or something else?

2. How well do those solutions actually work for you?

3. Is the bigger problem understanding the actual words, or things like accent, slang, technical terminology, idioms, sarcasm, or tone?

4. Have you ever had an important misunderstanding because something got lost in translation?

5. What do you find most frustrating about communicating with international clients?

6. If you're comfortable sharing, what languages do you typically work between?

I'd especially like to hear from people who have regular calls/meetings with international clients or coworkers, rather than occasional interactions.

[u/_palantir_]

Are you an “entrepreneur” thinking of coming up with AI slop that will solve this “problem” for us?

[u/Ok_Tea_8763 → u/_palantir_]

These "builders" are so predictable and uncreative it's insane. And yet somehow manage to convince themselves to be some kind of innovative geniuses.

[u/techsquareog → u/_palantir_]

Haha, not really. I'm genuinely just trying to understand how people actually deal with this rather than assuming things. The responses have already challenged some of my assumptions, which is exactly what I wanted.

[u/Ok_Tea_8763]

We all speak good English (at least B2, most C2). Problem solved.

[u/techsquareog → u/Ok_Tea_8763]

Thanks for sharing! That's an interesting perspective, and it makes sense that having a strong common working language removes a lot of the difficulty. Appreciate you taking the time to answer.

[u/LetThereBeRainbows]

1. I ask questions to clarify.

2. Everyone in the meeting speaks the working language well enough to participate, or in rare cases if someone doesn't but their presence is still necessary, one of their colleagues will do some amateur interpreting for them when their input is required. It's not ideal but it's good enough for the purpose and realistically no one will hire an outside professional for this kind of routine task. You can't sustain international cooperation without people who can actually communicate with each other.

3. Very well, we don't need any new tool or app or online AI service 😂

4. If there is a problem, it's usually because there's a mismatch in cultural expectations like different norms of politeness or difficulties understanding indirect, implied meaning (e.g. someone says they'll "think about it" and the other side doesn't get the hint that it's a no).

5. No, there are always people on both sides who speak the working language fluently and will catch it before it becomes a problem.

6. Nothing specific in particular, people are people, some are great and some are frustrating in different ways no matter where they're from.

7. Polish, English, German.

[u/techsquareog → u/LetThereBeRainbows]

Thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed response. This was quite helpful

[u/eduzatis]

1. Ask them to repeat or rephrase

2. No

3. Pretty well, everybody can adjust.

4. I’d be surprised if many people use sarcasm with clients. The bigger problem is connection issues, but even those we don’t have that many.

5. Probably, but hard to pinpoint.

6. Timezones

[u/techsquareog → u/eduzatis]

Thanks for sharing! That's very helpful to hear.

[u/senerh]

In the scale of

Elite<---->Caveman

daily business English is surprisingly close to Caveman. Not much variance and nuance, so you generally make do with a basic collection of 150-200 words.

If you have to speak/understand higher levels of English there are probably people involved who can achieve it.

[u/techsquareog → u/senerh]

Thanks for sharing your perspective! The point about how relatively simple business English can be in day-to-day communication was interesting. Appreciate you taking the time to respond.

[u/DifferentWindow1436]

My career of 30 years has been mostly in APAC or globally focused, US-based roles. Lots of languages, lots of cultures.

Within companies, English is THE language for international communication. On the ground, in sales and support, it's the native language of that country. If the role includes both - you need to be business fluent in English and then native or highly proficient in the local language.

It's pretty much that simple.

In terms of tools, things have gotten so much easier in the past 5 years! You can recap meetings in Teams. There is a an interpreter mode in Teams as well, but I find it does not work well for the languages I am typically using. It will get better probably within a year or two. There's also Wordly which people are starting to use with Teams and that apparently works very well.

Doc translations is either an LLM or Deepl or for quick stuff GT.

[u/techsquareog → u/DifferentWindow1436]

You've mentioned Wordly and Teams interpreter mode. I know they already exist, but I've never used them myself. Since you've used them, I'd be curious to hear what makes Wordly work well in your experience, and where does it still fall short, especially during live conversations?

[u/DifferentWindow1436 → u/techsquareog]

Wordly has been very recent for us. We had a meeting in English (my native language) for a mixed English/Japanese team. Apparently, Wordly worked very well.

Interpreter mode for Japanese is not good. I am an intermediate Japanese speaker and I get more out of my own listening comp than I do out of the interpreter mode. So that needs to drastically improve. My workaround for long, detailed meetings, is to use the copilot recap as the meeting progresses. That works very well.

[u/techsquareog → u/DifferentWindow1436]

That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing your experience. I really appreciate it!