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"But I don't have a language problem..." Ask a Briton or an American about the purpose of Language. If you can get any straight answer to what seems such an easy question, 10-to-1 you'll be told that Language is for Communication: language is for sharing your thoughts, with your family, your students, your colleagues and customers. But if that's so, how come languages are so ineffective, and so restrictive? You can travel to any corner of the earth in just a couple of days. But no language on earth will let you talk to more than a fifth of the world. And remarkably, for most of the others, a speaker's potential audience is no greater than 10,000 people, the size of a small town. Yet all the forms of human speech in use today, over 6,500 of them, are rich enough to describe someone's whole mental world, to live and love, to work and play, to buy and sell, to feel, think and imagine. So all of us face the problem that the vast majority of people that might be interested cannot understand a word of what we have to say. And even as English-speakers, we cannot understand more than 20%, at the utmost, of what is potentially of interest to us. Language-barriers face us in every direction, even if we don't tend to look that way very often. For business people, this is becoming more and more of a serious waste. Paradoxically, as cheap air travel, cellular telephones, the internet, and video-conferencing open the world to us on ever easier terms, language differences remain as the serious obstacle to gaining new business. If your business is monolingual, up to 80% of your potential market might as well not exist. And the businesses who have been able to ignore this problem in the past, the speakers of the world's majority languages, English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian among them, will suffer most, for they have not cultivated the means to present themselves in others' terms. They do not know about:
Increasingly, technical aids
are there, but how can the inexperienced user know who is supplying
what, how useful it might be, and in what context?
Linguacubun Ltd is a consultancy company that has spent the past decade watching these markets grow, all over the world, and fostering the technologies which are building bridges between the worlds of different languages. We can help you to answer the questions which will increasingly decide who is to succeed in the next generation of international business.
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