International Business

The modern business no longer tends to rely on just the clients inside a single country, that is, if they want to survive in the intensely competitive world we find ourselves in. Contracts are changed each and every day as companies scramble to undercut each other and promise more and more, that's why you're going to need the best communication skills you can get, especially when dealing with important overseas employers. In this article I will discuss my experiences with language translation services and how they could help you get a foot over the competition and keep those all important clients.

Imagine a scenario, you've been providing a service for a foreign customer for 3 years now and while you've been providing a good service they've decided to look elsewhere and see if they can get a better deal on what you provide. Now, this is all perfectly normal, it's not massively nice but it's basically common practice to try and cut costs (even if they're going to get a lesser service). Now, you speak English and your client speak Japanese, they are currently speaking to a French firm about the service they can offer. Which one do you think the Japanese client is likely to choose: the English speaking firm who have taken the initiative to hire a professional language translation service to remove the language barrier and get down to brass tax or the French speaking firm who have been making do with a mixture of free online translators and the guy in the office who speaks enough Japanese to get by? Yes, that's right.

But, really, that's just the short term advantage of it, in the long term you can look forward to having a consistent tone and reliability in your correspondence with other companies that can't be matched with any free online translation service. Personally, I encountered a similar situation the one I wrote about above and I can tell you, the air of professionalism that was given off by being able to send fluent emails back and forth really gave us the edge over what appeared to be an amateur in comparison to us and we kept the business for years (they're still working with us now). I believe the correct way to see it is as another string in your businesses bow, no longer will foreign customers seem like an extra burden just because of the language barrier, I don't think you can put a price on that.