The Importance of Cross Cultural Communication and Multilingual Interpretation

Navigating today’s multi-national business world requires effective communication. Participants from the far reaches of the planet flock to conferences. Video calls shrink the world even more, allowing team members from every nation to join a meeting. Even small companies today have a workforce distributed across the globe.

Communication is so important, thousands of books have been written on the topic, and corporations spend billions of dollars a year on communication skills training. Yet, despite its importance, many organizations ignore language as the primary barrier stifling effective communication.

Language Barriers Impact Revenue and Opportunities

Typically, company executives or the meeting hosts will pick the language everyone will use, most commonly English. And conference planners often select the primary language for their event, too, and require all session use that language.

However, this model doesn’t take into account that some team members and participants lack fluency in that language. Not only does this drag out meetings much longer than necessary, but also the outcomes often are misunderstood. All these inefficiencies can end up costing a lot of money.

But, these costs are difficult to quantify: how much money and time do companies lose through miscommunication and misunderstanding? How many great ideas get missed because meeting participants just simply can’t get their thoughts across to one another over the language barrier? How many would-be conference attendees choose not to go to conferences that they really want to attend because they feel they’ll miss too much of the content to make it worthwhile?

How much revenue do conferences miss out on by not offering a way to bridge language barriers?

Improving Cross Cultural Communication

Occasionally, the producers or executives might bring in an interpreter for a conference or a really important meeting. Even then, the interpreter can only cover a handful of sessions.  Let’s face it, an interpreter is just too expensive for most meetings and conferences.

What if things could be different?

Imagine a world without language barriers. Every meeting you participate in and every conference you attend, you can see and hear the content in your own language. Every time you want to share, you can engage in your most fluent language and be understood.

Language On Demand makes that a reality.

With wordly’s Language On Demand, team members join an in-person or online meeting without worrying about the language of the meeting. They can listen to the presentation on their headphones and see the text on their device’s screen translated into the language of their choice.

Global meetings can be just as effective as local meetings when participants understand each other. And companies can accomplish twice as much without lengthy follow-ups and post-meeting reviews. Language On Demand enables global teams and engages all team members regardless of their fluency in English.

When conference attendees use Language On Demand, they will see and hear every session in their native language. No longer constrained by language barriers, attendees from around the globe are able to authentically engage with each other.  

wordly provides Language On Demand for professionals to use in meetings and at conferences for instantaneous and continuous conversations.