But what is the Scope of natural languages in Business?

Friends accuse me of being too lengthy while explaining things. Hence a summary of the article on translation activities on India:

Natural Language is integral part of people’s culture in any particular geography. Natural Language does not express people’s IQ or coding skill but their cultural identity, existence, choices and aspirations. That was reason the most successful Mogul emperors as well as the British translated most of the literary texts, scriptures, legal and all others kinds of texts available in their colonies – we know of the extensive work British rulers had done in translating texts (18\19th century) in the fields of Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit. Among many other supporting factors, “Reading” the subjects and native employees through their language and literature helped them to succeed.

Let’s look at the resemblance of a business administration in a global enterprise to that of an imperial Government. Business these days runs in a world where globalization is, more than a choice. It is only option for growth of an enterprise, irrespective of whichever part of the world the enterprise comes from. Global business does recruit people from different parts of the world same way a colonial Govt did. They have to manage people from different cultural backgrounds from different geographies. They have to sell goods and services in different parts of the world. Analyzing customer’s requirement becomes the first step in the steep road of global sales same way as creating own acceptability was a challenge to Moguls or East India Company. Is it possible to define what kind of service of product would perfectly suit to customer’s need without understanding customer’s cultural existence which is best expressed through their language and literature?

The world of business unequivocally takes the shape of a Mogul empire to some extent where number of decision makers is many, leading to a joint decision making portfolio instead of one emperor show – but at the core of it resides the idea of managing many people from different cultural existence – sometimes numerous, depending on the nature of the industry. If scenario is similar, can we completely avoid deploying similar applications (with modifications, of course) and still win?

I remember - once I was discussing the importance of developing the habit of practicing couple of languages in global business environment with one colleague. My point was - this could serve both the purposes of 1) understanding and communicating with customer and 2) in-house need of creating a comfort zone for new joiners from different countries. His first question to me was –“Why do we need to learn foreign languages other than English? I speak English – why don’t the French and German and Japanese learn English like us?” My next 10 minute’s lecture on impact of colonialism on Indian languages worked some or other way I guess, while his next words were, “See, if English could do it, we will also do it! See some day you will translate SAP into Hindi; none of your Badshahs and Sahibs exists anymore.” 

I could not continue the same discussion with my young colleague any longer - seeing his face glowing with pride in having one language of his own -  dreaming of establishing own empire where he could make non-Hindi speakers translate technical documents into his language……………….