I N T H E T RENCHE S
How to Communicate With Customers Speaking Another Language
By Allen McBroom
40
If you attended Sunday school as a child, at some point you probably learned the story of the Tower of Babel. The gist of the story was that mankind had gotten kind of pompous and decided to build a tower so tall it would reach Heaven. God took notice and knocked down the tower. Just as icing on the cake, God also confused the tongues of those involved, and suddenly everyone was speaking a different language. Bedlam ensued, and people scattered to be with folks who spoke their own language. It must have been pretty tough to be in business right after the tower fell. Just imagine, you’ve got a stall in the local market there in Babel, selling imported maize cakes and exotic roots, and suddenly all your business is conducted by pointing and shaking your head up and down, or wagging it left to right. The previously reliable shared language is no longer all that helpful. That must have been very frustrating, especially when handling returns or discussing the price of a quart of honey. Our store exists in sort of a modern-day Babel environment, and maybe your store does, too. We have a major university a couple of miles east of us, and the international students often come here to browse. Many of our string rental students have Mandarin or Korean as their first language. Many of our guitar and keyboard customers speak Spanish or some other language as their primary tongue. Since we are a predominantly agricultural area sort of close to our southern border, we also have a lot of Spanish-only-speaking workers who visit the store on a regular basis. As the only employee of the store with some command of Spanish, I’m usually asked by other employees to work with the Spanish speakers.
Since I also speak a little Korean and Mandarin (translation: I can say “hello” and “thank you” without causing an international incident), I’m called to the forefront every time we have a customer who speaks those languages. My only real skill is my patience, and usually, between my limited vocabulary in their language, their limited vocabulary in English, and a lot of pointing, we manage to swap products for money. If you often have customers who speak a variety of languages in your store, you’re likely familiar with the scenarios I described above. If the customers at your store don’t currently speak a variety of languages, that will likely change sooner rather than later. For some time, I’ve been using Google Translate (translate.google.com) on my phone to communicate better with international speakers. I type what I want to say, Google translates my text to their language, and they type in their reply. It’s cumbersome, but it works pretty well. (By “pretty well,” I mean when I say, “I’m sorry, but I have to charge tax,” it doesn’t come out as, “I’d like to date your red umbrella.”) It’s also free, which helps. If you’d like to better serve international speakers in your store without typing every sentence into Google Translate (or without hiring a team of United Nations translators), rejoice! Google has recently upgraded its translation capabilities to some exponential degree. Now, you can go to the app store on your smartphone (both Apple and Android) and download the Google Translate app. Once installed, you’ll need to play with the app a bit; it’s not complicated, but it does require a little exploration to find the settings you really want. Here are the basics of what the Google Translate app can do for you. You tell it your language (for me, English is as close as I can get; there is no setting for Southern), and the language of the other speaker (let’s say they speak Italian). Translate now gives you a screen, written in Italian, that says something along the lines of “Hi, I am going to use my phone to translate my words into Italian, and yours into English. If that’s okay, we’ll get started.” You show the screen to the other person, and when they nod agreement, you press the “Conversation” button. There are two ways for the Conversation feature to work, and you’ll have to pick one or the other. APRIL 2021
