How These People Run a Successful Multilingual Meeting

As the business expands overseas, you may get a chance to work with business partners / suppliers / clients across the world. In today’s blog we share a story of our friend, a Japanese businessman who has overcome language barriers that he faced at work.

Lost in Translation

He often needed to manage international projects with his job. The last time he hired an interpreter, using the other service than Oyraa, turned ugly during his business trip to South Korea. Long story short: the meeting didn’t go great as the interpreter couldn’t provide a sufficiently convincing interpretation. Nonetheless, he had to pay the interpreter for airfare, accommodation and meals in addition to the interpreting fees.

Three Businessmen in Different Languages

More recently, he was assigned to a project that involved working with two different business partners from Nigeria.

There are over 500 languages spoken in this country, and apparently these two men didn’t speak a common language. More specifically, one of them lives in Nigeria and speaks English as his mother tongue, while the other one is currently based in Japan and speaks a bit of Japanese but isn’t comfortable with English when it comes to technical terms.

Avoiding Jargon

They then decided to work with an interpreter over the phone, using Oyraa for the first time. The interpreter made efforts to translate into simple and basic Japanese and English, so that everybody in the meeting can understand what is going on.

Why Oyraa

The telephone meeting lasted approximately 30 minutes. In the end, everyone agreed that it was one of the most successful and efficient conference calls with an interpreter. Besides the excellent job that the interpreter did, our Japanese friend noted that he’s highly satisfied with our affordable fee without the heavy costs like travel expenses or commission that he used to pay for on-site interpreting services.

Rina is our contributor at Oyraa. Originally from Tokyo, she used to be an account executive at a tech company but followed her passion for languages after attending conferences in Singapore and the United States. She has since then become a translator and has lived in Honolulu, Dublin and now Lausanne.