Writelife

One of the intriguing things about looking at blog statistics is, over time, you see what interests people. And, at least to some small degree, you can see who is interested in what posts.

Of all the posts I’ve written, the one that keeps coming up is Language as a communication barrier, which I posted just over a year ago. Interestingly, people finding it seem to be from outside North America. From what I can tell from the search engines used, quite a few are from Pacific Rim countries.

What does that mean? Well, at the very least it suggests it’s a real issue for people in that part of the world. How much of an issue, or what they’re view is, I can only guess. But if I could speculate, I’d say they may be finding difficulties interacting with the English speaking world, particularly North America.

If you have read The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, you might feel (as I do) that this is a real problem. As countries like India and China continue to grow and expand economically, becoming increasingly significant in the global economy (and as North America’s significance decreases – even if only through it’s relative relationship with the rest of the world), the ability to work with these countries, to keep pace with and take advantage of the way the world is changing, will be hobbled by poor communication.

From a business perspective, companies won’t be able to communicate with their employees and customers. Growing markets will be inaccessible because our stories (as Seth Godin would put it) will require translation.

And let’s be honest … North Americans, by and large, aren’t too worried about being able to communicate with the rest of the world – yet. We more or less hope they can speak English. Or that some software will translate English into the appropriate language.

But even if there were a way to get around the problem of different languages (whether by learning other languages or the magic of software), there is a great deal more to communication than language. For example, stories such as “McDonald’s withdraws ‘insulting’ China ad” are not unusual. This problem isn’t one of language; it is one of culture.

It may be that the real difficulty of communication is that it is difficult. It’s complex and many things that affect it are subtle. I can look at an image and a woman in Thailand may look at the same image and while we both see the same picture my interpretation of it and, more importantly, how I feel about it may be completely different than the way she interprets and feels about it.

I’m not sure what my point is here except that in a world going global our ability to communicate will be increasingly important, not less.

And it won’t be easy.

Tag: Writing, Communication, Language

Listen to this podcast

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites