Lost in Translation - The Daily Pitfalls of Intercultural Communication

Many of us Europeans will fondly remember Bill Murray wandering aimlessly through the Tokyo nightlife with Scarlett Johansson, and his hilarious attempts to understand the director's indications during the video shoot for a whiskey commercial. Many of us will also be familiar with facing gibberishly-looking road signs while roaming the streets of Budapest, Copenhagen or Berlin. The most adventurous may even have experienced the uncanny feeling of complete alienation when trying to decipher Chinese characters, Arabic squiggles, or Amharic runes in a local restaurant in Xi'an, Muscat or Addis Ababa. Shivers still run through my spine when I remember the raw beef, liver and tripes served to me in Seoul following such an attempt - and our Asian and American colleagues probably have had similar mishaps in Europe (haggis, anyone?).

We associate these experiences with the excitement of an exotic holiday and the thrill of a business trip, confident in the knowledge that everything will be back to normal when we sit comfortably in our office, slurping our coffee while perusing our Outlook inbox. After all, aren't we master communicators behind our keyboards? Haven't we completely assimilated the communication standards within our company? Surely, everyone will fully understand our e-mails - after all, we all write in plain English, some with more, some with less panache.

I used to think like that. After ten years at our company, in different roles and following various international assignements, I was proud to manage a multi-cultural team within the Marketing department in Frankfurt. I considered myself an intercultural veteran. However, the travails of one of my team members, Virginie, made me realise once again how even seasoned communicators can end up in a storm of misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

A native French speaker, Virginie had no trouble whatsoever navigating the waters of our Parisian office, effortlessly communicating with every echelon of our business, right up to our locally based CIO. She used the French typically used in a business context - a delicate balance of formality and informality, with a touch of directness and a stylistic flourish here and there.  

Her English emails exhibited similar features. As her team head, I didn't really notice - after all, they looked and sounded similar to other e-mails received from French colleagues. But perceptions can vary. "Why does Virginie waste time with writing flowery salutations?" a team mate from New Zealand wondered. In contrast, some German colleages thought: "Virginie's e-mails are very direct!" Virginie's emails were at the same time considered too harsh and too fluffy - now there was a conundrum!

Fortunately this hubbub could be easily solved: by making transparent to everyone involved that no, Virginie was not being unduly aggressive to German colleagues, and that no, Virginie was not wasting time with coming up with creative salutations, as this was such a standardised feature of communicating in various European cultures that it virtually became an automatism.

It left me thinking, however. Didn't I too have my share of miscommunication with our Asian colleagues in a previous role? What about those emails from our American colleagues, which I considered rather impolite? And hadn't there been that epic e-mail battle between a German and a British colleague about the proper use of e-mail etiquette?

The bitter truth is: each and everyone of us unconsciously carries with them a cultural baggage, which surreptitiously influences the way we communicate. We can learn to moderate it, yes, we can learn to adapt it to the high or low context culture of our counterpart, but we will never be able to fully get it out of our system. Nor should we - it is a part of who we are, warts and all. In any case, we will never be able to fully mimick the culture our our counterparts.

No, the only way to solve the intercultural communication problem is, paradoxically, through more communication. You received an e-mail you thought was impolite? Give that person a call. You're not sure you fully understood their message? Give that person another call. You have the feeling that not all issues are tackled in the call? Organize a VC. The VC still leaves you with an eerie feeling that your concerns are not being addressed? Consider whether the subject is important enough for a face-to-face meeting.

At times when communication is exploding (via Social Media, What's App, Snapchat and who knows what next), when our business and our clients become ever more global, when emojis bring us back to the Age of Hieroglyphs, we should always remember:

We are all Virginie.

PS: Many thanks to Virginie for accepting to feature in this piece!