Wai Mun KooPMO Director| Intergraph PP&MSingapore, Singapore
I believe most of you had been involved in at least one or two multi-nationals projects where language and culture are the key problems that you have to deal with. In some projects, you even need to hire a translator to help out in meetings, discussions and documentations. I am not going to go through the long list of drawbacks with engaging external translators, but I am interested to find out if there are any other better approaches, besides having an external translator, to manage language and culture problems in your projects. Please share your thoughts. Thanks. Saving Changes...
In my experience:
- People already have enough trouble understanding each other when they speak the same language. In a multi-language environment, things can quickly become a nightmare of vagueness and misunderstandings. Solve the language problem first - agree on a common language that everyone is sufficiently proficient in, complement with training if necessary. Be ready to write down more info that you normally would, and use simple, non-ambiguous wording as much as possible.
- Some consulting firms offer help with multi-cultural endeavours by providing side-by-side analysis of local practices and customs in the workplace. If your pockets are deep enough, that can be an invaluable source of information to better understand your alien, slightly weird colleagues.
- Barring that, an open mind and genuine curiosity are your best friends, along with Google and Wikipedia (and Gantthead). Be prepared to ask a lot of questions, and not necessarily approve of the answers. You'll probably have to wrap your head around some really new perspectives, and explain your own (hence the importance of solving the language problem first as mentioned earlier). Saving Changes...
Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
Sorry, I don't have any experience with translators, apart from knowing one personally. I do know though that if you are looking to recruit someone to help in meetings you should be looking for an interpreter. Interpreters do real-time speech translation. Translators tend to work with documents. As a result, an interpreter would be a better bet to help with cultural problems, but I've not worked with one of those either, so I couldn't say for sure!
Research and an open mind have always helped me.
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Mark Price PerryBusiness Driven PMO Evangelist| BOT InternationalOrlando, Fl, United States
Having numerous past project experiences in this exact scenario, all of which experienced massive difficulties and one after another mishaps that in hindsight are now quite laughable though hardly funny at the time, I can say the biggest lesson I learned was not having a skilled local business consultant to advise on local business practices and cultural nuances in communication. For example, yes does not always mean yes. And, some questions are inappropriate to ask (publicly and privately) in terms of compromising the position of another. And on and on.... In all of those projects, I had interpreters and translators, which were very helpful but not nearly enough in terms of business practices, cultural nuances, and general local "savoir faire"... Saving Changes...
Wai Mun KooPMO Director| Intergraph PP&MSingapore, Singapore
Mark, agree that 'trusted' translators are key to bridge the language gap. Of course, it will be ideal if the translators also have the required industrial or domain knowledge. We had a bad experience of hiring a translator who failed to articulate our concepts in the proper context thereby, causing a lot of misunderstandings (though she is pretty good in normal language translation). In the end we have to replace her with another translator with the required domain knowledge we need.
Also, just to raise a point that in some incidents, I realized that we kept going back to the white board and rely on the universal language - 'drawings' to further clarify and validate our understanding. I find this pretty useful especially to explain a concept that is hard to explain in words but a picture clears up all the doubts. Saving Changes...
