How can you ensure your communication plan includes all languages and dialects?

This is such an important step and one that is all too often overlooked. Taking the time to fully understand your audience, their communication preferences and styles will mean you hit the ground running with your comms. Asking employees from local areas to become Comms Champions will give you a regular route into continuously understanding if your comms are hitting or missing the mark so you can adapt accordingly. It also demonstrates that you truly care about understanding your audience, giving them a voice and connecting with them through internal communications.

Language, dialect and culture please. Culture influences ways the language is used and how things are done. Cultural sensitivity is very important.

It's critical to get input from local businesses units. Work with employees in each country to tailor and deliver content. If you just translate global content, you are communicating AT them. We should be enabling others to communicate, not just delivering what we want them to know.

Translating content helps you reach a wider audience by making your content accessible to readers of different languages. Localization specifically goes beyond a simple translation, localization is done to adapt content culturally. It ensures that what you have to offer becomes relevant to that culture, because by localizing you are creating a message that resonates with the target audience, considering cultural nuances, preferences, and sensitivities. Localized content tends to engage more effectively. People are more likely to interact with information that feels familiar and culturally relevant. This can lead to increased user satisfaction, longer periods of engagement, and higher conversion rates.

Active listening is an important part of the engagement. If you are running a campaign be prepared to adjust and tweak as you go based on what you're hearing.

We all love a GlasgowGPT perspective:? Ye just need tae huv a bit ae respect an' consideration fur folk.? Take the time tae identify the languages an' dialects spoken in the area ye're targetin'. Hire translators who know their stuff an' can capture the essence of the original message in a way that'll make folk feel like ye're chattin' wi' them doon the pub. Git yersel' immersed in the local culture. It's no enough tae send a generic message an' hope for the best. Naw, ye need tae dive deep an' show folk that ye gie a toss. Show an interest in their traditions, events, an' local quirks

When I worked on a big booze account in South Africa in the 90s, we visited shebeens in Soweto to get a better understanding of the culture. We had a very cool Sowetan native as our guide. Learned that a condom was called a number 9. Named after the shirt worn by Neil Tovey, a central defender for the fabulously-named Kaizer Chiefs. Tovey had a reputation for never letting anyone through! That said, on a hotel photo shoot in Nairobi in 2012, I discovered a condom brand called Prime Flow. Go figure. For the record, I was not shopping for condoms at the time!

Please DO NOT rely on machine translations. Get it verified by real humans before cascading the messages. Create a pool of enthusiastic volunteers who can spare some time checking the translations. And please thank them for their time and efforts.