Achieving a sense of purpose within the business context

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 434.

The most important characteristic of exchanges in the context of business meetings, telephone calls and discussions is a sense of purpose. Language is used to achieve an end, and its successful use is seen in terms of a successful outcome to the business transaction or event. Users of Business English need to speak English primarily so that they can achieve more in their jobs. Business is competitive: competition exists between companies and also within companies, between employees striving to better their careers. It follows that performance objectives take priority over educational objectives or language learning for its own sake. For example, a German company in Seoul may have a long-term objective to establish good trading relations, and their representative's use of English is geared to that end. A French telecommunications project manager in India needs to know English to communicate with his technical terms on the site, who are all Indian. A Swedish pharmaceutical product manager needs to give clear presentations of recent product development to subsidiaries in Europe and the Far East. In each of these examples, the use of the language has an implied element of risk; mistakes and misunderstandings could cost the company dearly.

Most of the language needed by businesspeople (apart from social language) will be transactional: getting what you want and persuading others to agree. A significant amount of business is being lost to European enterprise as a result of lack of language skills. On the basis of the sample, it is estimated that 11% of exporting European SMEs (945,000 companies) may be losing business because of identified communication barriers. Analysis of the findings from the survey identified a clear link between languages and 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 translators and interpreters. There could be very significant gains across the whole EU economy if all exporting English is a key language for gaining access to export markets. However, the survey results suggest that the picture is far more complex than the much-quoted view that English is the world language. Russian is extensively used in Eastern Europe as a lingua franca (along with German and Polish). French is used to trade in areas of Africa and Spanish is used similarly in Latin America longer term business partnerships depend upon relationship building and relationship-management.