To be competent in another language obviously also depends on what the purpose or use of the language is going to be: having small talk in a restaurant with a business partner and a detailed product presentation for a huge audience require different levels of foreign language competence.

But be careful! Foreign language skills should never be regarded separately from other social competencies. It might happen that it is not the German businessman who gets the order after a perfect product presentation with representatives from a Portuguese company but the pleasant Romanian partner, after the Romanian had appreciated the excellent wine of the host, the latest victory of Benfica Lisbon and the monuments of the city. The German had not been able to contribute very much to this kind of conversation during the last hour as he had “only” attended a course of technical English …

What does this mean? We need the skills to fulfil our task. A service technician, for example, will have to master the technical terms but never forget the importance of everyday English for an informal conversation or to acquire some knowledge of and a real interest in the partner (country) – these might be more decisive factors than perfect business English.

 

You may ask why the author of this component refers to English. Well, he would also like to see a wider range of languages in use in the international communication. When we regard demographic development, Arabic or Chinese perhaps will be dominating languages in future, forcing also the English to learn foreign languages …

Foreign language competence is also a political instrument. Surely, during negotiation the native speaker from the UK has advantages as the non-native speaker might sometimes be more occupied with finding the right words than with the subject of negotiation (therefore Esperanto was a good suggestion to establish a kind of equality among all partners in conversation). English is the so called “lingua franca” now, mostly used and understood by a lot of people, and this will be the situation for the near future. Besides starting (secretly) learning Arabic, always be prepared to say some words in the national language of your business partner. This will be considered as an expression of politeness and interest. There are tendencies in large companies not to negotiate in English but in the partner’s language as this has been proved to be more successful.

The author hopes that the input so far has motivated the reader to get to know even more about the importance of foreign language competence in innovation. So let’s read on to the next chapter … 

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