In the video transcript, Vicki Flier Hudson and Uli Dendy discuss the importance of cultural and linguistic IQ in business.
Vicki shares her experience of accidentally starting a riot in India, which led her to study cultural differences. They emphasize the importance of understanding different accents and cultures in order to communicate effectively.
They suggest having outlines, messages, and workbooks translated, and having interpreters present in meetings with diverse language backgrounds. They also stress the need to respect and appreciate different cultural approaches to solving problems.
[Transcript]
Welcome everyone to the World Trade Center. My name is Vicki Flier Hudson from Jairo Global Services, and this is my colleague, Uli Dendy of TrueLanguage. We’re here to talk about cultural and linguistic IQ.
My background is in translation. I didn’t start out that way. I studied social sciences in Germany and then came to the US where I studied microbiology and genetics. “Oh, you’re German, you speak another language, you could be a translator.” One of the big misconceptions: just because you speak another language does not make you a translator. And I actually got my start a little bit differently than Uli. I was an adventurer traveler in my 20s. The first couple of days that I was actually in India, I accidentally started a riot in a railway station in Calcutta. Thank you. So I set out, and I decided to dedicate basically the rest of my career in life to figuring out more of the depths of culture and how important that is in business.
Normally what we tell our clients is that discomfort is part of the process, that it’s okay to be uncomfortable. And nobody wants to tell another person that they don’t understand them. An email and IM and all of these tools are certainly good to augment your work, but if they become the sole means of communication, you will pay the price. So there’s this danger of this misconception just because you read an email that may sound arrogant to your ears. How do you get over not understanding an accent? Keep listening to that accent. So a lot of folks complain to me, “I don’t understand my Indian colleagues.” But I’ve been traveling to India for so many years when I hear those Indian accents, I understand them 100 percent. It’s not because I have any special talent, it’s only because of exposure.
We’re going to now present you with some of the solutions and the things that have worked well for us. And they’re not universal solutions, but hopefully, they’ll spark some ideas. If there’s an easy solution, what most of our clients do is have the outline translated, have the main message translated, have sometimes the whole workbook translated on a page-to-page correspondence, and you can still have it in English, but they have it in front of them in their native language so the level of comprehension is much, much higher.
If you have a team of people that you work with that you’re dealing with different languages and different accents, you actually need to have a discussion around how you will handle it when you don’t understand each other’s Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and Spanish beforehand, which they distributed. And then for the meeting, they had interpreters present. At the end of the meeting, Marta was recognized by the FDA. It doesn’t mean that the diversity of thought and cultural approach cannot still be respected. So even if the meeting is linguistically conducted in English, it’s still helpful to think about what different cultural approaches could be taken to solve the common problem and to have respect for that. And that means everybody wins.
