A typical situation in which the business world relies on interpreters is a head-on collision with a language barrier. This can happen when your company receives guests from another culture, such as China, and you simply do not have any common language. It is self-evident that without a professional interpreter, such a business meeting would yield no results.
However, I would venture to say that interpreting is useful in other business-related situations, too. Even when everyone can use English – more or less fluently. Below, you will find some good reasons to arrange interpreting also for other business situations.
1. Remember that someone may genuinely need interpreting
We often assume that everyone can use at least English. However, the truth is that the ability to speak foreign languages varies just as much as the ability to do maths. The threshold for revealing your own insufficient language skills may also be high.
Interpreting gives everyone an equal opportunity to understand and participate in the discussion. What is crucial is expertise, not language skills.
2. Increase the efficiency of communications
Insufficient language skills can lead to misunderstandings. It can be difficult to find the right words or you cannot express yourself as clearly as in your native language. Good language skills alone are not always enough: there are different accents, difficult abbreviations or culture-specific metaphors, which are something that professional interpreters are trained in.
In a Forbes survey, more than half of companies (65%) admitted that insufficient language skills lead to inefficiency and lower productivity in business. Learning languages certainly helps, but it is slow when compared to using interpreting at key events.
3. Create more business
The more languages you use in your business, the wider the audience you invite to participate and the more business opportunities you create.
A webinar in Finnish about your company’s new services will reach only Finnish speakers and perhaps some others who happen to know some Finnish, whereas including interpreting in Swedish will improve your company’s business opportunities in the Swedish market as well. With remote interpreting, it is very easy to add interpreting in almost any language to almost any remote meeting platform.
4. Improve the customer experience
By providing interpreting in different languages, you not only create new business opportunities but also show that you take into account the variety of languages among your customers. This means you can improve both communications and the customer experience.
A brilliant example of recognising the benefits of interpreting in business and putting the customer experience at centre stage is Nordic Business Forum: Although this mega business seminar organised in Helsinki will be held entirely in English, all main stage presentations will be interpreted simultaneously into Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. By providing interpreting in these languages, the organiser welcomes participants from these language areas, giving them special consideration among the more than 6,500 participants. The number of participants from these countries will increase and new business opportunities will emerge.
5. Be a pioneer, try AI interpreting
Given the level of hype about AI, a true pioneer will provide AI interpreting in appropriate situations instead of no interpreting at all.
This kind of interpreting is handled entirely with the aid of computers: speech recognition software converts source-language speech into text and the machine translation engine translates the text, which is then converted into target-language speech.
Naturally, the above-mentioned entirely technology-based interpreting is an alternative that does not fully replace a professional human interpreter in all situations. However, it is undeniable that in some language pairs, the output quality is already quite high. Entirely technology-based interpreting is extremely cost-efficient and a good option when the language pair and the interpreting situation allow it and when the alternative would be to not arrange interpreting at all.
We are happy to advise you on what kind of interpreting and technology is best suited for a certain business situation. You can also read more about our interpreting services here.
