Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal

Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal
Language management in multinational companies

Alan J. FeelyAnne-Wil Harzing
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Alan J. FeelyAnne-Wil Harzing, (2003),"Language management in multinational companies", Cross Cultural Management:
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Helle Andersen, Erik S. Rasmussen, (2004),"The role of language skills in corporate communication", Corporate
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Volume 10 Number 2 2003
37
Language Management in Multinational

Companies
Alan J. Feely and Anne-Wil Harzing
The Authors
Alan J. Feely, Aston Business School, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, England and Anne-Wil Harzing, University of Melbourne, Department of Management,
Faculty of Economics and Commerce, Parkville campus, Melbourne, Victoria 3010,
Australia.
Introduction: The Trend to Global Co-ordination
Evidence suggests that as many as three out of four multinational companies now
manage networks of twenty or more overseas operations (John et al., 1997). The
co-ordination burden of managing such geographically, culturally and linguistically diverse networks is daunting. Nevertheless, many multinational companies
spurred on by the twin goals of the transnational model (local responsiveness allied to strong global direction) have accepted the challenge and have sought to
strengthen their global co-ordination. They have done so in different ways employing a variety of management methods most notably Total Quality Management, Global Sourcing, Virtual Organisations, Co-Design, Human Resource
Management, Concurrent Engineering, Corporate Culture, Extended Enterprise
Management, Systems Integration and Centralised Treasury Management.
The performance benefits of these systems are indisputable. For example,
Global Sourcing allows companies to balance trade, hedge exchange rate risks and
to buy materials at world-best prices. JIT has allowed companies to slash stock
levels and minimise obsolescence. TQM has enabled companies to improve product and process quality enhancing company economics and customer satisfaction
in tandem; and Concurrent Engineering and Co-Design have greatly shortened
time-to-market spans and have improved product design by leveraging the knowhow of suppliers and production engineers.
Attesting to the importance of these advantages a 1996 McKinsey Group
study (Theuerkauf et al, 1996) of leading US consumer-product multinationals
confirmed that successful companies were much more effective in integrating
their international acquisitions, and much more accomplished in global coordination, than their less-successful contemporaries. Foremost issues leading to
this competitive advantage included global management development systems
and global electronic integration, sensitivity on the part of the parent company to
38
Cross Cultural Management
the specific national circumstances and close networking between their global
managers.
However, whilst it is easy to understand that co-ordination is a key source of
competitive advantage, it is equally undeniable that such co-ordination makes
global communication capability a pre-requisite for success. Physical distance
makes effective communication necessary and cultural distance makes effective global
communication essential. (Spinks & Wells, 1997). As a palliative, companies have
invested heavily in the tools of modern-day communication. Global intranets,
video-conferencing, e-mail networks, global integration of IT systems and workflow technologies have all contributed to making information flows faster, easier
and more secure. However, these tools just like their less technologically advanced predecessors, founder when language is a serious barrier. Perhaps one example taken from the authors personal experience in the Fiat Group will illustrate
the point.
The Palio was Fiats first foray into the concept of the world car. As the car
was designed principally in South America, Brazil and Argentina emerged as the
source of most pressed components including those for the exhaust. However, for
sound strategic reasons it was decided to produce the catalytic converter in South
Africa. These converters were then shipped to Italy to be matched with the other
components of the full exhaust system that were then shipped to Poland for assembly onto the vehicle. To exacerbate problems a small quota of the exhaust systems were then onward shipped from Poland to the smaller Russian plant. This
global supply chain met its strategic objectives keeping costs low, balancing trade
flows across countries and creating global centres of product expertise. But behind
the scenes the communications problems were severe as logistics personnel along
the supply chain struggled to work in a mix of Spanish, Portuguese, English, Italian, Polish and Russian. Fiat had made the communications tools available. All
those involved had e-mail, integrated stock systems, fax and desktop videoconferencing, but, in the absence of linguistically versatile logistics staff, they failed to
avert the predictable confusion, suspicion and friction, triggered by language
problems.
This one example can be readily generalised to other areas of business activity. To Finance who co-ordinate cash flows, investments, bank loans and currency
purchases across the globe. To Marketing who have to direct product, pricing and
promotional strategies worldwide. To R&D who develop new products in collaboration with design centres, suppliers and production installations spread across
numerous countries; and to IT tasked with the challenge of integrating the diverse
systems of their global operations. They will all confront the question how best to
manage communications across the language barrier?
39
The Dimensions of the Language Barrier
Before attempting to consider language management strategies, companies will

have to evaluate the magnitude of the language barrier confronting them and in
doing so they will need to examine it in three dimensions. The first dimension is
the number of different languages the company has to manage (the Language Diversity). The second is the number of functions and the number of levels within
those functions that are engaged in cross-lingual communication (the Language
Penetration) and the third is the complexity and refinement of the language skills
required (the Language Sophistication). These three dimensions are discussed below:
Language Diversity
The level of language diversity will obviously depend on the extent of the companys global network of subsidiaries, customers, suppliers and joint ventures,
though even the most international of enterprises will embrace only a minute fraction of the worlds 5,000 plus languages. Global giants such as Microsoft have
strategies to manage around 80 different languages. However, this is likely to be
an unrealistic target for most companies. More typically global enterprises will be
able to manage their global networks provided they establish capabilities in the
leading European languages, including some from Eastern Europe, in Japanese,
Chinese, Arabic and in selected Asian languages notably Malay, Urdu, Hindi and
Bengali. An Elucidate study identified the top dozen or so language priorities for
European companies (Hagen, 1999). This number is suggested also by the Engco
model (Graddol, 1997) which uses population, demographic and economic data
to position languages on a scale according to Global Influence. Beyond the leading
15 or so languages on this scale none can really be claimed to have any significant
global influence.
Language Penetration
The level of language penetration will depend on the number of functional areas
within a MNC that have to operate across linguistic boundaries. There may have
been a time when cross-lingual communications could have been channeled
through a small and exclusive band of language specialists. However, as we have
discussed in the previous section, the new integrated systems of global coordination now touch almost every function of the business and at multiple levels.
Finance (Global Treasury), R&D (Co-design), Production Engineering (Concurrent
Engineering), Logistics (Supply Chain Management), Sales (Global Account Management), Purchasing (Global Sourcing), Human Resources (Global Management
Development) and MIS (Global Systems Integration) are all directly tasked with
coordinating activities that span national and linguistic boundaries; and corporate
level functions such as Legal and Public Relations require the same linguistic versatility to be able to support them.
40
Language Sophistication
Clearly the complexity, refinement and type of the language skills required will
vary from post holder to post holder, within an organisation. A receptionist will
require essentially speaking-listening proficiency and might suffice with the limited skills necessary to recognise requests and to exchange pleasantries. A logistics
clerk will need to have a greater foreign language capability including reading
and writing, but will at least have the benefit of being able to operate with a limited vocabulary. An engineer working as part of an international design team represents a further progression in language sophistication. They will be required to
evolve concepts and resolve design problems in both spoken and written forms
without language being a barrier; and at the pinnacle of the scale comes the international manager. He or she will need excellent language proficiency embracing
the full range of rhetorical skills such as negotiation, persuasion, motivation and
humour. At this level the capability level might well exceed that of a typical Masters graduate in modern languages.
Measuring the language barrier dimensions
The tools for measuring these three language barrier dimensions are provided by
Linguistic Auditing (Reeves & Wright, 1996). The methodology is designed to enable international companies to evaluate their foreign language requirements and
to benchmark these against their capabilities thereby identifying areas of strength
and weakness. It goes on to assess the companys language training and recruitment needs and evaluates the efficacy of these programmes. Finally, it provides
the means to match the organisations foreign language capability against its strategic aspirations.
Unfortunately, research suggests that Linguistic Auditing has not been widely
adopted (Randlesome & Myers, 1998) and that most companies have yet to develop language strategies (Hagen, 1999). Arguably the problem is the fact that a
full audit is a costly and time-consuming process requiring extensive support from
external language assessors. So to combat this criticism a simpler, less costly system called Language Check-up has been developed as a front-end to the Audit
methodology (Reeves & Feely, 2001). Although lacking the rigour and reliability
of the full Linguistic Audit, the check-up offers some notable advantages. It is
self-administered avoiding the cost of external language specialists, it generates
results quickly and it embraces a wider range of language issues than the audit.
Specifically it evaluates the status of Corporate Language standardisation, the
availability of computer systems, publications and web sites with multiple language interfaces, the capabilities and controls on external language resources and
the usage of machine translation tools.
We strongly feel though that it is not only the cost that has deterred companies from auditing their language skills and developing language strategies. We
41
also believe that companies underestimate the importance of language as a management issue. Accordingly, the next section is dedicated to exploring the impact
of the language barrier on international business.
The Impact of the Language Barrier

The impact of the language barrier cannot be evaluated using simple measures
such as dollars spent on interpreters or days lost in translating documents. Instead
the true cost has to be seen in terms of the way it distorts and damages relationships. These in turn then impose pressures and constraints on the strategies pursued by the company and the organisations and systems they consequentially
adopt. Founded in sociolinguistic theory, Feely & Harzing (2002) offer a more extensive discussion of these processes. In summary however, it is worth noting that
the language barrier triggers a whole range of negative consequences. It breeds
uncertainty and suspicion, accentuates group divides, undermines trust, and leads
to polarisation of perspectives, perceptions and cognitions. And, of course, that is
just the start. With the all-pervading nature of communication, it is hard to imagine any aspect of management that emerges undamaged by the corrosive effects of
uncertainty, mistrust, conflict, and cognitive divides. Below we have advanced
ideas illustrating just a few of the more of the most probable consequences.
Buyer/Seller Relationships
Companies facing the prospect of globalising will sense a greater cultural distance
and will be aware of greater uncertainty about markets that do not share their
language and salespersons working in their second language will appear less able,
less credible, less likeable and ultimately less persuasive. As a consequence, companies will, in general, have more success selling to countries that share their language. Buyers too, when working in their second language, will not be as
confident and assertive and will lose some of their relationship power. As a result
they will be less successful in gaining advantageous deals. Aware of this, buyers
are likely to demand increasingly that negotiations are conducted in the language
of the customer. Companies unable to work in the language of the customer will
therefore under-perform in export markets relative to their more linguistically
able competitors, and this is not limited to the Sales Department. All areas that interact with the customer will be similarly affected.
Foreign Market Expansion
The process school of internationalisation (Johanson & Vahlne, 1977) predicts
that companies at the beginning of their global development will prefer to establish subsidiaries that are characterised by a low level of psychic distance to their
home country. Language differences are a crucial element of psychic distance. In
the absence of this possibility, parent companies will prefer to establish subsidiaries in countries where English, the dominant international language, is widely
spoken (Welch, et al, 2001).
42
Joint Ventures
Whenever the host country and the parent country do not share the same language, the parent will inevitably feel an increased sense of uncertainty and will
prefer an entry method where risk can be shared. Thus joint ventures will be likely
where there is language difference. Joint ventures between partners where only
one of the partners has an international language will end up working in that language. Subsequently, as a consequence of power through communication, the
partner with that language might start to dominate the relationship, which will
pose increasing pressure on the JV.
HQ-subsidiary Relationship
Wherever language is a barrier to the development of close personal relationships
the level of suspicion, mistrust and conflict between a parent company and its international subsidiaries will be heightened. Such mistrust will cause the parent
company to be more formal and less subjective in its evaluation of subsidiary performance, and may also hinder collaborative processes such as knowledge and
technology transfer.
Staffing Policies
Companies will be more prone to employing expatriates in important positions at
subsidiaries where the host country has a different language to the parent operation. As a consequence of the internationality of the English language, American
and British companies and others that have English as the corporate language rely
less heavily on expatriates than those companies that have other languages
(Harzing, 1999; Yoshihara, 1999).
We have not attempted to present an exhaustive list of the potential impact of
the language barrier or to provide irrefutable evidence for our speculations. Future empirical work should be able to address this. Our aim was to illustrate that
the impact of the language barrier can be wide-ranging and potentially serious to
multinational enterprises, and that language should therefore be managed as a
corporate asset. We will now turn to the main topic of this article: the options
available to MNCs to manage language and to alleviate the problems it creates.
Options for Managing Language Problems
Having examined the relationship problems and their consequences that might be
caused by language issues and using the tools of Linguistic Auditing and Language
Check-up to evaluate the dimensions of the language barrier confronting them,
companies next need to turn their attention to how they should best manage lan-
43
guage. There is a range of options from which MNCs can formulate their language
strategy.
Lingua Franca
The simplest answer, though realistic only for English speaking companies, is to
rely on ones native tongues. As recently as 1991 a survey of British exporting companies found that over a third used English exclusively in dealings with foreign
customers (Metcalf, 1991). This attitude that one language fits all has also been
carried through into the Internet age. A survey of the web sites of top American
companies confirmed that over half made no provision for foreign language access
(Frook, 2000), and another found that less than 10% of leading companies were
able to respond adequately to e-mails other than in the companys language
(WorldLingo, 2001). Widespread though it is however, reliance on a single language is a strategy that is fatally flawed. It makes no allowance for the growing
trend in Linguistic Nationalism whereby buyers in Asia, South America and the
Middle East in particular, are asserting their right to work in the language of the
customer. It also fails to recognise the increasing vitality of languages such as
Spanish, Arabic and Chinese that over time are likely to challenge the dominance
of English as a lingua franca. In the IT arena it ignores the rapid globalisation of
the Internet where the number of English-language e-commerce transactions, emails and web sites, is rapidly diminishing as a percentage of the total. Finally,
the total reliance on a single language puts the English speaker at risk in negotiations. Contracts, rules and legislation are invariably written in the local language,
and a company unable to operate in that language is vulnerable.
Functional Multilingualism
Another improvised approach to Language is to rely on what has been termed
Functional Multilingualism (Hagen, 1999). Essentially what this means is to
muddle through, relying on a mix of languages, pidgins and gestures to communicate by whatever means the parties have at their disposal. In a social context such
a shared effort to make one another understand might be considered an aid to the
bonding process with the frustration of communication being regularly punctuated by moments of absurdity and humour. However, as the basis for business negotiations it appears very hit-and-miss; and yet Hagens recent study suggests that
16% of international business transactions are conducted in a cocktail of languages. Functional Multilingualism shares the same defects as reliance on a lingua franca and increases the probability of cognitive divergence between the
parties engaged in the communication.
External Language Resources
A more rational and obvious response to the language barrier is to employ external resources such as translators and interpreters, and certainly there are many
excellent companies specialised in these fields. However, such a response is by no
44
means an end to the language barrier. For a start these services can be very expensive, with a top Simultaneous Interpreter commanding daily rates as high as a
partner in an international consulting company. Secondly, any good translator or
interpreter will insist that to be fully effective they must understand the context of
the subject matter. This is not always possible. In some cases it is prohibited by
the complexity/specialisation of the topic, sometimes by lack of preparation time
but most often the obstacle is the reluctance of the parties to explain the wider
context to an outsider. Another problem is that unless that there has been considerable pre-planning between the interpreter and his clients it is likely that there
will be ambiguity and cultural overtones in the source messages the interpreter
has to work with. They will of course endeavour to provide a hi-fidelity translation
but in this circumstance the interpreter has to use initiative and guess work. This
clearly injects a potential source of misunderstanding into the proceedings. Finally, while a good interpreter will attempt to convey not only the meaning but
also the spirit of any communication, there can be no doubt that there is a loss of
rhetorical power when communications go through a third party. So, in situations
requiring negotiation, persuasion, humour, etc., the use of an interpreter is a poor
substitute for direct communication.
Training
The immediate and understandable reaction to any skills-shortage in a business is
to consider personnel development and certainly the language training industry is
well developed, offering programmes at almost every level and in numerous languages. However, without doubting the value of language training no company
should be deluded into believing this to be assured of success. Training in most
companies is geared to the economic cycle. When times are good money is invested in training. When belts get tightened training is one of the first luxuries
to be pared down. In a study conducted across four European countries (Hagen,
1999), nearly twice as many companies said they needed language training in
coming years as had conducted training in past years. This disparity, between
good intentions and actual delivery, underlines the problems of relying upon
training for language skills. Unless the company is totally committed to sustaining
the strategy even through bad times, it will fail.
One notable and committed leader in the field of language training has been
the Volkswagen Group. They have developed a language strategy over many years
and in many respects can be regarded as a model of how to manage language professionally. However, the Volkswagen approach underlines that language training
has to be considered a strategic rather than a tactical solution. In their system to
progress from basics to communications competence in a language requires
the completion of six language stages, each one demanding approximately 90
hours of classroom tuition, supported by many more hours of self-study, spread
over a 6-9 month period. The completion of each stage is marked by a post-stage
achievement test, which is a pre-requisite for continued training. So, even this
45
professionally managed programme expects a minimum of three years of fairly intensive study to produce an accountant, engineer, buyer or salesperson capable of
working effectively in a foreign language. Clearly companies intending to pursue
this route need to do so with realistic expectations and with the intention of sustaining the programme over many years. Except in terms of brush-up courses for
people who were previously fluent in a foreign language, training cannot be considered a quick fix and hence other methods will have to be considered.
Corporate Languages
An alternative to a customised training programme (in which different individuals
are trained in different languages) is to adopt a single corporate language. All recruitment and personnel development could then be focused upon achievement of
required standards in that one chosen language. A number of major multinational
companies have adopted this strategy including Siemens, Electrolux, DaimlerChrysler and Olivetti. A Corporate Language can be considered to have a number
of important benefits:
Facilitation of formal reporting.
Ease of access to, and maintenance of, technical literature, policy and
procedure documents and information systems.
Facilitation of informal communications between operating units and within

cross-national teams.
Fostering a sense of belonging as an element in diffusing a corporate culture.
And, of course, it does focus the management of language problems.
However, in no sense is a Corporate Language solution without problems:
It is a long-term strategy. One study of a major Finnish company reported

that decades after the designation of English as the Corporate Language, the
minutes of board meetings were still taken in Finnish (Marschan-Piekkari et
al., 1999).
It is sometimes effectively impossible to adopt a single language for all

circumstances. Nestle, for example, faced by a polarised split of personnel,
designated both English and French as the companys official language
(Lester, 1994).
A corporate language will often incur resistance if there is a large body of

corporate personnel lacking competence in the chosen language. In Kone, the
Finnish elevator company, for example, English was adopted as the corporate
language despite the fact that almost two thirds of its employees were
non-native speakers of the language (Marschan-Piekkari et al, 1999); and,
46

although a corporate language may well enhance intra-company
communications, it does nothing to ease the language barrier with external
bodies such as customers, suppliers, international agencies and governments.
So, for these other solutions must be examined.
Language Nodes
In the absence of sufficient language capability and without the time or finances
to adopt a training or corporate language approach, companies become heavily
dependent upon their scarce linguistically skilled personnel. These key personnel
become informal language nodes establishing themselves as the default communications channel between the company and the external world. Whilst it is understandable that companies leverage their scarce skills in this way, research has
indicated that the approach has numerous drawbacks (Marschan-Piekkari et al,
1997):
It places an onerous burden on those acting as language nodes impairing

their ability to perform their formal organisational duties.
It introduces an increased risk of miscommunication, as the language node

personnel might be inexpert in the field of work that is the subject of the
communication.
It invests in those individuals the power to act as communication

gatekeepers. This inevitably brings with it the risk that this power will be
used in counter-productive ways filtering, distorting or even blocking
transmission, thereby impeding rather than facilitating the flow of
information from the parent company.
Finally, within a parent subsidiary or Joint Venture relationship the Parallel

Information Networks based on these nodes undermine the formal chain of
reporting, weakening the positions of the senior managers who are being
by-passed and hence creating potential for conflict.
So whilst it is important to leverage skills within an organisation it is of paramount importance that language-skilled personnel do not themselves emerge as
sources of organisational dysfunction.
Selective Recruitment
As noted in the case of Nestle, the easiest and cheapest way to approach the language problem is to hire people already possessing the required skills (Lester, 1994).
However, this is clearly not a painless solution implying, as it does, the redeployment and perhaps redundancy of existing post-holders lacking those skills.
Moreover, there is considerable evidence to show that the right level and mix of
language skills is not always available in the marketplace (Hagen, 1999). So the
47
recruitment approach to bridging the language barrier must be used very selectively, and is probably advantageous only in three distinct situations:
To fill critical areas of language exposure
To create a language node (see above).
To develop expatriate managers.
Expatriate Management
Continuing that theme, one immediate solution to any multinational company facing a language barrier with its subsidiaries is to assign expatriates to work within
each subsidiary to act as the language node linking back to corporate headquarters. Every major global company employs expatriates but research suggests that
companies with parent operations domiciled in countries with minority languages
will rely more heavily on them. As an example, the two key components of the
Japanese Model of Globalisation have been summarised as Management by Japanese and Management in the Japanese language (Yoshihara, 1999). His research of
leading Japanese multinationals indicates that the vast majority of their subsidiaries (78%) are managed by Japanese Executives and more than half employ Japanese expatriates at departmental manager level. One clear explanation for this is
the necessity of Japanese headquarters to continue working in the Japanese Language as evidenced by an analysis of telephone and fax traffic between the Japanese headquarters and their US subsidiaries. Nearly 90% of all telephone calls
were either partly or wholly conducted in the Japanese language and 83% of the
fax traffic was also drafted in Japanese. Clearly in Yoshiharas example the use of
expatriates has eased the problem of the language barrier between the parent and
subsidiary but in no sense can this be considered a satisfactory solution:
It is an inherently costly solution. In many cases the base salary paid to the
parent company manager will be considerably higher than a corresponding
salary for a host country national, and that base salary can be more than
doubled by the addition of assignment-related allowances (Dwyer, 2000).
Add to that the lump sum incentives paid at the start and end of each
assignment and it is unsurprising that many companies are electing to cut
back their usage of expatriate managers.
It does not eliminate the language barrier, but merely shifts it down a level.
Linguistically, the expatriate managers have to develop a twin personality. In
Yoshiharas survey while more than 80% of headquarter contact is conducted
in Japanese, 99% of host country management is conducted in the local
language. This is a serious source not only of expatriate stress but also of
internal conflict within the subsidiary where several researchers (Neal, 1998;
Sargent & Matthews, 1998) have shown that language problems are often
the principal barrier to team working.
48

Finally, but most importantly, this approach limits local managers to
supporting roles in the company development, impeding knowledge transfer,
blocking career opportunities and undermining the potential benefits from
cultural diversity. Using a phrase made famous by Bartlett & Ghoshal (1986),
companies like the Japanese multinationals relying heavily on expatriation,
will be unable to tap their subsidiaries for global reach.
These defects allied to the earlier problems discussed under Language Nodes
suggests that expatriation is at best an interim solution capable of bridging the
language gap only until a more complete solution is developed.
Inpatriation
An increasingly popular way of combating the language barrier is to inpatriate
subsidiary personnel into the head office operation. As an example, the HQ of the
Electronics Division of Fiat that until the late 1980s had been manned exclusively
by Italians was by the mid 1990s truly multinational with French, Belgian, Spanish and Lebanese managers being introduced into first-level management positions. It is a popular strategy too amongst British companies with the HQ of Royal
Dutch Shell employing a staggering 38 different nationalities; and even the Japanese, who at one time exalted the cultural homogeneity of their management
teams, are now seeking to introduce national and cultural diversity into their top
management teams.
The benefits of inpatriation strategies are clear. They inject cultural diversity
into the HQ operations, they provide communication links to the operations and
institutions of countries from which they came and they offer a cost-effective alternative to situations where expatriates are less likely to succeed. Developing
these themes Harvey identified seven discrete advantages of integrating inpatriate
managers into parent company management teams (Harvey, et al, 1999). One
other advantage not listed by Harvey but certainly a consideration relative to expatriation is that of internal conflict. Think of the analogy of mixing water (the
parent company) and sulphuric acid (the subsidiary). Inserting a drop of acid (the
inpatriate) into the water has almost no effect as they readily become subsumed
into the corporate culture. However, placing a drop of water (the expatriate) into
the more volatile subsidiary produces a mix that can be explosive!
Despite its appeal, the inpatriation strategy is not without drawbacks. If the
inpatriates are less than fluent in the parent company language, this could seriously impair their short-term effectiveness and will delay the realisation of benefits to the company. Also the problems of repatriation are notably more severe
than with expatriates because the individuals concerned have to be re-inserted
into a much subsidiary organisation that typically is much smaller than the HQ;
and empirical research suggests that inpatriates require extensive and custom-
49
designed support programmes during the acculturation and socialisation phases

(Harvey & Miceli, 1999).
Machine Translation
All of the potential solutions to the language barrier discussed previously rely
upon human means. However, computing does hold out the possibility of an alternative - Machine Translation (MT) and its sister technology Machine Interpretation (MI). Machine translation has been around for over four decades; for a fuller
history refer to Hutchings (Hutchings, 1999). Machine Interpretation is more recent but is essentially a machine translation kernel with a speech-recognition
front-end (in the source language) and a post-translation speech generation module (in the target language). All of these technologies are quite mature and extensively used. A thorough review of the state of the art is provided by Haynes
(Haynes, 1998) who describes Machine Translation as the technology that can no
longer be denied. So is this the definitive answer to language management? Well
at the moment the jury is out.
Reviewers of Machine Translation are fairly unanimous in recognising an advantage in speed relative to human translation, though the scale of the advantage
varies from four times to 50 times depending upon the reviewer. However, there
is less of a consensus about the quality of translation possible. Supporters believe
that MT is currently capable of working cost effectively for most translation needs
where the objective is to extract information from the source text and communicate
that information into a target text in a second language (Haynes, 1998); and MI
enthusiasts are equally optimistic. They believe that the new generation of intelligent, self-learning MI systems such as SATS will make real time, high fidelity
automated interpretation a reality (Lehman-Wilzig, 2001). However, these views
are not in the majority and for the moment more pessimistic opinions dominate.
The attitude of professional translators concerning MT was described as somewhere between the skeptical and the scathing (Haynes, 1998) and even some developers describe the current state of Machine Translation with the words the
disappointing past and present (Kay, 2001). In business terms, therefore, the MT
and MI technologies still appear more appropriate for development laboratories
and for small-scale pilot projects, than for mainstream applications. However, for
those attempting to move ahead Haynes (1998) provides a useful checklist of
measures that will enhance the possibilities of success.
Controlled Language
The last approach used by multinational companies to bridge the language barrier
is that of Controlled Language. A controlled language imposes limits on vocabulary and syntax rules so as to make the text produced more easily comprehended
by the non-native speaker/reader and equally more amenable to machine translation. Caterpillar in 1970 was the first to launch such a system with CCE (Caterpil-
50
lar Controlled English) that allowed a vocabulary of only 8,000 words including
product terminology (compared to over half a million words in the full English vocabulary). General Motors then followed this lead launching their own system
called CASL (Controlled Automotive Service Language). Clearly such systems have
merit, as evidenced by Caterpillar who have successfully employed theirs for over
three decades. However, as a solution to multinational communications the potential of a controlled language is clearly limited. The costs and timescale for implementation are prohibitive to all but the worlds largest companies, a restricted
vocabulary is advantageous only to those who share the same alphabet, and its usage is effectively limited to the written form where it is possible to filter and simplify language before transmission. More importantly still, the scope for
communicating in a controlled language is clearly limited to conveying operational detail. To impose this constraint on business situations demanding persuasion, negotiation or motivation would clearly rob the participants of their powers
of rhetoric.
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated that there are sound strategic reasons why multinational companies should seek to enhance their global co-ordination. The achievement of such an enhancement is by no means a simple task however, and will be
made that much harder whenever language is a barrier to international communication; and given the demographic, social and business trends predicted for the
future it is difficult to see how any company can contemplate going multinational
without going multilingual at the same time.
Language interfaces in these businesses will trigger problems of miscommunication, uncertainty, mistrust and conflict and unless these problems are professionally managed, they will bring detrimental consequences for the business and
its relationships. Linguistic fragmentation results in depressed economic performance for whole countries. It would be nave to think that the same impact would
not be felt by linguistically fragmented companies.
So, the challenge facing these businesses is how to manage their language
problems effectively. This article advances a range of different approaches that are
employed in different contexts and concludes that each one has a tantalising mix
of advantages and disadvantages, and that for sure no single solution can be considered a panacea. The secret therefore, would seem to be to understand the language barrier well and to mix and match the solutions into a blend that is right for
the company context. But even understanding the problem is a challenge and
companies with multinational relationships to manage are strongly urged to conduct language check-ups and linguistic audits.
51
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