By David James
Page 2 of 2
A secondary approach is to hire a professional interpreter for your negotiations. There are many highly qualified people who can provide this service, and there are translation agencies that can supply just the right person for your needs. Often these interpreters are available in the city where negotiations will be held. The caution here is that interpreters need to be carefully screened and tested, to make certain that they fully understand your objectives and can accurately translate and interpret all the technical lingo and idioms relevant to your business.
When negotiating with interpreters, the best policy is to identify them as a neutral party in facilitating the discussions, even if they are an employee of your company. It's important that an interpreter earn the trust of both sides.
For important negotiations, an
unacceptable approach is to rely on the interpretations and translations of
the other party. These might be provided entirely in good faith, but they
can be inaccurate or misleading in some significant way and harmful to the
interests of one or both of the parties. Often problems that arise in this
way are caught before a contract is signed, but they sometimes leave a
residue of suspicion and resentment.
Language differences, however, should never be considered a "problem." Accommodating them should be as routine as providing meeting facilities that will assure productive negotiating sessions. Indeed, overemphasis can appear to be patronizing. One U.S. company, at its first negotiating session with a Chinese group, thoughtfully presented elaborate translations of written materials into Chinese and an oral introduction in Chinese by a interpreter, but they failed to check on the language ability of their Chinese counterparts. It turned out that their counterparts were fluent in English and felt somewhat slighted that they were assumed not to know English.
Some businesspeople think that interpreters unnecessarily prolong the length of negotiations with their repetition of statements in the other language. To the contrary, I think they tend to focus the discussions, prevent time-wasting misunderstandings and avoid pursuit of tangential issues. They are also well practiced with my two most useful phrases, "I do not understand" and "what do you mean by that?"
Previous Page......... Page 2 of 2