We live in a globalized world, which means we establish connections with people from different cultures, places, and languages daily. This happens more frequently in large companies with offices in other locations. Effective communication is crucial in building relationships, collaboration, and teamwork. What happens if this communication fails in critical areas such as corporate training?
In global companies, the linguistic and cultural realities of each professional differ. Therefore, organizations must provide native language training during onboarding, acquisition of skills, or presentation of products and procedures. It’s also essential that the information is clearly understood and not open to misinterpretation.
Providing employees with native language training can help companies avoid issues caused by inadequate communication or misunderstandings. Research has shown that people comprehend and remember information more effectively when presented in their native language: they can focus on the content without expending energy translating it into their mother tongue. Furthermore, offering native language training enhances comprehension and performance and boosts employee confidence and motivation.
Training must be tailored to your learners’ needs
Training employees entails presenting information or content so all employees who receive it can comprehend it. Therefore, corporate training should adjust to the different realities and requirements of the learners. Just like companies strive to customize learning according to the training needs of each department, the language in which they are taught is a crucial factor in guaranteeing their comprehension.
Language disparities between workers and supervisors or colleagues are one of the major challenges companies encounter when training staff. The reasons are straightforward: instructions given in other languages can lead to misinterpretations, raising the risk of mistakes and even accidents in specific industries.
A study revealed that the main problems caused by language barriers include inefficiency, which accounts for 67% of the issues; lack of effective collaboration, affecting 46% of projects; decrease in productivity, reaching 42%; and loss of talent, representing 16%. These are just a few negative impacts that language barriers can cause. Even so, despite many industries having an international workforce, very few of them can adjust their corporate training to the native languages of their employees.
Breaking language barriers is essential for improving training
In general, companies must recognize the importance of linguistic diversity. It’s also necessary for them to ensure that all employees have access to the essential information and training to carry out their work efficiently.
Language barriers affect the workforce’s effectiveness and can diminish productivity, while native language training can increase it. According to the report, Reducing the Impact of Language Barriers, prepared by Forbes Insights and Rosetta Stone, more than 80% of those surveyed agreed that workers were more productive when their managers communicated with them in their native language.
In this regard, companies can take various steps to break language barriers, and the most crucial one is to provide training in the native languages of their employees.
Multilingual training ensures that all employees comprehend and participate in the learning process. Implementing it prevents the omission or misinterpretation of key elements as each language has specific nuances and references, and utilizing them lets your audience understand the message more clearly.
E-learning training as part of the solution
Understanding that native language training is the logical response to this issue; it’s much easier to identify which learning solutions we can adopt to bridge this gap. E-learning is the best learning model for this.
This methodology, backed by the utilization of new technologies to design, deliver and extend learning, has a quality that makes it unique: it adapts to specific needs such as language. As a learning method for companies, e-learning offers multiple advantages, such as flexibility, cost reduction, continuous updating of knowledge, and the opportunity to personalize training.
Viewed in this manner, developing e-learning courses independently and translating them enables global organizations to scale and personalize their training more proficiently and effectively. This allows for greater flexibility to adjust training to the requirements of employees worldwide and react to changes in the market and the industry quickly.
Furthermore, the capacity to translate existing training content diminishes the time and expenses associated with starting from scratch. It enhances security and loyalty amongst staff (particularly those based remotely). It brings students closer since if the target audience has another native language, barriers to comprehension and closeness are broken so that they identify with the brand.
In summary, autonomy and translation of e-learning courses are vital strategies for global organizations to boost their competitiveness and capacity for innovation in the current market.
Expand the reach of your courses with isEazy Author Translations
At isEazy, we want to assist you in increasing the reach of your e-learning courses and breaking the language barrier with the number one tool for creating e-learning courses: IsEazy Author. If you want to develop courses in various languages, isEazy Author allows you to do it in just a few clicks. Personalize the language of your classes and bring learning closer to all your employees!
The automatic translations of isEazy Author are powered by Microsoft Azure Translator, an Azure service that utilizes AI and machine learning within the Azure Cognitive Services suite. To translate a project, you have to go to the project, select automatic translation, and choose the desired language – it’s that easy!
Do you already have a project created? Don’t worry; isEazy Author also enables you to effortlessly and quickly translate your existing courses, using the export and import text functionality to update your projects with translations in the languages you need. What are you waiting for to begin trying the number-one authoring tool in the market?
