The Value of Multilingualism

This post is excerpted from an article which appeared on www.freshbusinessthinking.com.  The information was harvested in the UK — a similar study in the U.S. would be welcome.  Why wait for the studies though?  In our hunt for greater exports, this could be important:

Cardiff University’s 2007 ‘Costing Babel’ research revealed that UK businesses miss out on £21 billion annually in lost contracts.

It followed an earlier study showing that the demand for non-English language skills in large European companies is greater than the demand for English — often seen by UK small and medium businesses (SMEs) as the international ‘lingua franca’ of business.

The 2006 ELAN Project survey, which emerged from the European Commission’s 2000 Lisbon strategy to stimulate economic growth and employment, said there was evidence of ‘Anglophone complacency’ within small firms.

The report highlighted the importance of language skills, as well as an awareness of cultural differences, to export success.

Four elements of language management were found to be associated with successful export performance: having a language strategy, appointing native speakers, recruiting staff with language skills and using professionally qualified translators or interpreters.

An SME investing in these four elements was calculated to achieve an export sales proportion 44.5% higher than one without these investments.

For the full article, see

http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/news.php?NID=10291&Title=Lack+of+language+skills+costing+British+firms+%A321+billion

linguistics, multilingualism

Miscellaneous, multilingualism