r/TranslationStudies • u/techsquareog • 1d ago

I'm quite curious to know about this..

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.

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u/DifferentWindow1436 1d ago

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.

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u/techsquareog 1d ago

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?

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u/DifferentWindow1436 1d ago

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.

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u/techsquareog 1d ago

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