Running a multinational company successfully involves a whole lot more than opening new offices, hiring new team members overseas, and optimizing your website to reflect your global reach. It also involves establishing and maintaining effective internal communication throughout your locations and among your global divisions.
Translating your website is an essential step in improving communication at all levels in a corporate environment and avoiding challenging language barriers. Let’s see how your business can benefit.
What you can do
Before looking at how your business can thrive through professional translation services, what exactly should be translated to optimize internal communications?
The first place to start is to translate internal documents, such as an employee handbook, training manuals, newsletters, and the like, to ensure teams from across global divisions are receiving the same information. All of this should be accessible through an employee-specific version of your website or intranet system so all employees have easy access to the information they need. Using professional translation services instead of relying on an online translation program like Google Translate will ensure the intended message is received by your employees, regardless of the language or culture.
Having a human translator who specializes in translating internal documents will help emphasize company goals, values, and vision, and it will help define important terms and phrases that might otherwise get lost in translation.
Establishing a shared understanding
Every company has a clear set of values and a mission that represents the brand’s identity, but what happens when you introduce employees who come from different cultures, backgrounds, and even geographies?
Let’s say you expand your company to Japan. How will Japanese team members interpret the values and vision of your company? We all bring our personal experiences to the table when approaching a new concept, so when you have people coming from entirely different backgrounds and perspectives, there can be a lack of understanding and even cultural faux pauses.
Through website translation services, you can more easily find common ground and ensure employees understand and share the company’s goals, objectives, and needs. After all, everyone wants to be effective in the job they do, but it’s about providing them with the right tools and resources to get there. Your website is the most effective tool for getting that information out there quickly and comprehensively.
Uniformity and consistency
Maintaining uniformity and consistency across your global divisions is an essential component in upholding a brand’s sense of identity, vision, and standards among its employees.
Think in terms of employee training and best practices. By effectively communicating company information and material through website translation services, you can ensure your team, whether they’re in the US or elsewhere in the world, are all on the same page.
Let’s take a look at a manufacturing business as an example. This industry boasts a diverse workforce with over 23 million immigrant workers—so establishing effective communication internally among staff and employees is paramount to ensuring success.
To maintain safety on the job, properly convey how to operate complex machinery, and understand industry regulations, businesses in manufacturing greatly benefit from translating important documents to avoid injuries and lawsuits.
Again, all of this information should be on hand through an internal employee website or presented through translated versions of your original website. Training and eLearning courses housed on these sites can also be a good resource for improving employee skills or onboarding new members while maintaining company standards regardless of what language the information is presented in.
All in all, any company stands to benefit from boosting communication through website translation, no matter the industry. You can’t put a price on keeping employees safe, informed, and focused on the task at hand.
Conclusion
Translating your website and hiring a remote workforce is just a small part of a company's ability to successfully reach international clients. It’s just as important to promote efficient and consistent internal communication among employees through translating important documents and training material using professional translation services.
Doing so will not only ensure a unified brand identity with your global divisions but will also ensure that the goals and needs of the company are 100% understood.
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