The Importance of Multilingualism in Marketing. Without mutual understanding it is impossible to live and work with other people, which is why in order to be successful in a globalized economy it is important to invest in language skills. A significant number of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises often miss out on valuable business opportunities as a result of a lack of language skills. Languages are necessary to boost sales and advertising, and their understanding will be crucial for those who want to gain a competitive advantage in world markets. It is increasingly common for goods or services that are marketed to cross borders, requiring language skills to facilitate their acquisition or sale.
The opening to multilingualism opens doors to new markets, new business opportunities and, although it is not a guarantee, it can even increase sales, as it facilitates the expansion of horizons and allows communication between individuals overcoming language barriers. . Now, the world needs people who, apart from having skills and knowledge, have a greater scope in the communicative interaction of the language.
Multilingualism represents a valuable opportunity for the internationalization and expansion of small and medium-sized companies. Companies are not sufficiently fluent in the languages of some major and emerging markets and highlights the need for both governments and companies to encourage language learning to consolidate the internationalization of the economy.
A determining aspect must be the construction of a formal communication strategy to establish contact with clients in the different linguistic areas in which they operate. Existing studies show that many companies lack them, which affects their scope. Four linguistic keys to international competitiveness are having a well-defined language strategy, hiring linguistically competent staff, having native speakers, and making appropriate use of translation/interpretation.
Nowadays, large companies have created linguistic or translation departments, which are in charge of managing orders with their main supplier, often an agency. Communication is between the two and said department, as the sole interlocutor, is in charge of answering the translators’ questions, sending the orders stipulating the required delivery times, sending the mock-ups for later review, etc.
These recently created departments are extremely important to correctly internationalize the products that are to be sold. They are related to the vast majority of other departments in the company itself: legal (to translate contracts, which will always be necessary), marketing (to translate new strategies), human resources (to translate training manuals), or design (to translate labels, logos, billboards).
Translation companies, for their part, have to adapt to the new needs that are observed: increasingly tight delivery times, dealing with documents in several languages at the same time with a single delivery, working with programs that are not always word processing, such as design used to layout brochures and catalogs, and always provide the best possible service.
Faced with this challenge that companies must face, they can choose to hire their own translators, however this can represent quite high costs since they will have to hire different linguistic experts each time they enter a new market. In contrast to this, it is recommended to outsource the service to agencies specialized in translation, dubbing and interpretation of content to reduce costs and ensure that the work is carried out by experts in this task. At LingoCall we provide dubbing, translation and interpretation services in more than 25 languages, contact us right now and we will gladly make a quote according to the needs of your business.
