BY YELLA REDDY VARSHANTH REDDY

How as a language professional we achieve considerable visibility in society as well as in the business field?

Language skills, usually at a very high level, are needed for successful business negotiations, be it for structuring the specifics of a contract or memorandum of understanding or for establishing guidelines for supplier processes. Poorly structured agreements, resulting from not understanding the legal terms in another language, "pain" into the future when companies finally realize the errors in the language of the contract to which they had agreed. The “pain” can be even more acute in countries where government oversight of business and legal operations is not very high. Without language skills, companies miss business opportunities announced in local media or from local government communications. Even on the domestic side, new business is lost or delayed because of a lack of language skills to negotiate the deals.

Hence, companies need a whole ecosystem of understanding among their customers, local communities, and partners in order to develop or promote a successful local product. Advanced language skills provide the foundation for trusted relationships with customers, communities, and partners. With those skills, we are able to enhance and maintain our connection with current markets and develop new ones fully aware of local customer needs and requirements.

To ensure a company gains attraction and retain top talent for a globally competitive company requires an investment in developing cultural awareness and language skills in your current workforce. Hiring managers must possess the skills necessary to recognize and assess this vital combination of global abilities while each day creating and maintaining an open and inclusive environment that is sensitive to a multi-lingual workforce. Also, in recent years, the US government has expressed a need for fluent speakers of languages other than English, particularly in less commonly taught languages such as Arabic and Chinese. It is obvious that even official monolingual countries like the USA have recognized the advantages of having citizens with competence in more than one or two languages in its job market and that multilingualism is a force to reckon with and to encourage.

It has been asserted that “language is power” and it is an invisible force that can penetrate visible social and economic boundaries. Being multilingual can be considered as a form of human capital for it can afford one the opportunity of earning a higher income and obtaining aspiring employment status in any influential society. A research study by Di Paolo and Tansel shows that in the Turkish labor market, knowledge of Russian and English as foreign languages, on the average, brings about positive earning differentials for individuals. These differentials increase with the level of competence. Knowledge of French and German is also positively rewarded in the Turkish labor market, although to a lesser extent. Since individuals make a society, the higher the number of residents with foreign language competence in a community, the more benefits that community will get from the positive attributes and affluence that come with bilingualism and multilingualism. Most of the advantages of individual bilingualism aggregate to quantifiable economic gains for the individual and the society or community. That is why some countries like Britain, America, France, and Holland which are officially monolingual realize the benefits of official bilingual or multilingual nations by virtue of intense de facto unofficial bilingualism and multilingualism attested within the nation-state.

Multilingualism has been attributed to the strength of promoting the mobility of the labor force in a single marketplace, thereby fostering employment heights and subsequent economic growth in society. Thus, if any nation wants to benefit from this type of economic force that can be easily generated by the mobile labor force, it has no choice than to operate a multilingual context.

Ultimately the challenge remains for these companies to identify good talent with language skills, either Americans or foreign nationals, and retain them for their skills. The lack of understanding and commitment from upper management to recognize the need for language skills internally undermines the support for those skills through improved recruitment of talent and improved compensation plans. Management often considers language skills a “soft” issue, therefore not requiring immediate or concerted efforts for change.

Hence being a language professional one can achieve considerable visibility and economic benefits in the business field as well as in society.