Why language skills are great for business

Don’t know your bonjours from your buongiornos? You’re not alone: three-quarters of British adults can’t speak a foreign language competently[PDF]. But the benefits of being able to communicate with overseas clients, suppliers and buyers are huge – as are the costs of lacking that facility.

“The UK economy is already losing around £50bn a year in lost contracts because of lack of language skills in the workforce,” says Baroness Coussins, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages (APPG). “And we aren’t just talking about high flyers: in 2011 over 27% of admin and clerical jobs went unfilled because of the languages deficit.” The APPG’s Manifesto for Languages is calling for a raft of measures to tackle this problem, including encouragement such as tax breaks for companies who invest in language training.

In-house language skills win clients

By offering those skills, SMEs could find their client base growing. Solicitors Moore Blatch has always welcomed bilingual employees – its staff includes French, German, Mandarin, Russian and Japanese speakers. So it was well-placed to respond when it was approached by Polish charities seeking help for clients who had suffered personal injuries. The firm now offers a dedicated Polish legal claims service.

“Many businesses will rely on the help of translators, but we have found that investing in a dedicated service has led to stronger relationships with clients – so much so that the majority of work the firm receives under this service is through personal recommendations,” says partner Ciaran McCabe.

It’s not just about the ease of communication, either: knowing a language also means understanding a culture. PR agency ING Media specialises in architecture and has a global client base. Managing director Leanne Tritton says the fact the staff are multilingual has had a direct impact on its success with winning international work. Serra Ataman, account manager at ING and a native Turkish speaker, works very closely with one of the firm’s Turkish clients. “I visit Turkey a lot,” she says. “So I’m able to keep up with news that might affect the client, and understand their challenges, and their way of working, and how these might translate into English.”

Some companies, indeed, will only consider those who have a second language. Sylvia Laws, founder of specialist global PR agency Technical Publicity, says the growth of her business can be directly related to the multilingual skills of the team. Many of their clients are multinationals. She says being able to communicate with a native speaker means business is done faster and more efficiently across big and complex markets.

“Our clients are usually working for multinationals but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re brilliant in English,” says Laws, who speaks French herself. “This slows them down enormously. It’s hugely helpful if we can ring them up and talk to them in their own language and understand where they’re coming from.

“Say one of our clients has a case study of a wonderful product, for example, which is coming from Italy, and we want to do a press release. Our Italian native speaker will take the brief, and then our other language speakers can pitch it to editors in their mother tongues. That has made a huge difference. When I first started doing this, we tried pitching in English. You just cannot get the same level of reception from journalists if it’s not pitched in their language.”

Then there’s the conceptual side, says Laws: “If we’re doing a funny ad in English for a major technology company, the comedy’s lost when we’re preparing it for the German market. So you need to work out how to achieve the same objective with the same visual but by changing the headline, and that needs mother tongue speakers”.

Help employees to learn

So how do you get employees up to speed? There’s a multitude of ways that SMEs can access training. This includes online providers such as Skillsoft and Rosetta Stone, which offer a variety of e-learning methods, including live online tutoring.

Guy Blaskey, founder of premium pet food manufacturer Pooch & Mutt, speaks French and Italian. He studied the languages at university originally, and has kept his skills fresh by talking to native speakers regularly and spending time working in France and Italy in his pre-Pooch and Mutt days. “I worked in an ad agency in Paris after university and the agency hired an American creative director whose French was terrible,” he remembers. “So that was actually really good for my skills, as I had to step up.” Pooch & Mutt exports to countries worldwide, including Finland, Sweden, America, Hong Kong and Turkey.

“At first, it was all about building a domestic market,” Blaskey says. “But as we grew and started to export more, the languages became more and more useful. I translated our product’s name and ingredients list into French and could proofread the Italian and Spanish to a certain extent.

“We were at a trade show in Germany and I was talking to some Italians who were interested in the product. My French is a lot better than my Italian but I was able to chat and say ‘hi’ to them in Italian. When we got down to the nitty-gritty of details and figures then we ended up doing it in English, but they very much appreciated the effort.”

Fluency doesn’t just come from courses, points out Tritton. “Learning a language is hard work, so the motivation and desire to undertake a language course really needs to come from the individual,” she says. “What we provide at ING is a framework to make that as easy as possible. That means funding the course and also providing any time off to attend lessons or study time.”

Translation services company Wolfestone encourages staff to practice with one another. “We have a Welsh-born project manager who speaks Spanish regularly with the Spanish natives who work for us, keeping her skills up to date,” says Roy Allkin, operations director and co-founder. “We do offer language courses but nothing beats actually using the language in your day job.”

As for which languages you should invest in, it depends on where you want to go. At Wolfestone, the languages most in demand are German, French, Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, with Arabic and Mandarin being the big growers. All feature in the British Council Languages for the Future report’s list of ten languages that will be of “crucial importance” for UK future prosperity – the others being Japanese, Turkish, Portuguese, Russian and Italian.

Mandarin is become increasingly important, says Laws, who doesn’t yet have a Mandarin speaker but is considering hiring a graduate and developing his or her skills. From 2004 to 2011, the value of UK exports to China quadrupled to £12.5bn.

But it’s important to remember that even if you’re not fluent, a few words can go a long way. “At trade shows, especially, people appreciate the effort more than the accuracy,” says Blaskey. “If your language skills aren’t great, there’s no point in trying to fake it. But it’s always good to try.”

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