4 Translation Tips for Better Employee Engagement in Internal Training

Whether during training or after full onboarding, communication between an employer and his employees is very important because, without proper employee engagement, employees will struggle to understand the vision of the organization they serve. If an organization is looking to expand, at some point it would have to onboard professionals from around the world to carry the expansionist vision. This means that the organization now has employees who speak different languages and as a global company, you must be able to train and communicate with your employees in their local language. However, engaging with your employees would not be effective unless there is an arrangement for translation.  Organizational communication is necessary for every entity that wants to grow. No matter the level of an employee, if they are not well engaged they will not deliver the result required of them. This article however talks about four translation tips that would help you engage better with your employees regardless of their language.

Contact professional interpreters for internal training: Before contacting professional interpreters for in-house training, you must have segmented all your employees according to the language they speak. You must note all their languages beforehand so that a professional is available to translate the training in the language they understand. Employing professional interpreters is necessary to help break the language barrier and to ensure that every employee is impacted with the same amount of knowledge during the training session. However, while training your multilingual employees you just be sensitive to their culture and encourage them to express their ethnicity without fear or inferiority.

Employ business translation services: Business translation services offered by professional organizations help businesses communicate effectively with their multilingual employees or client. Working with a business translation company is another way you can break the language barrier when training your employees. However, you have to choose whether you want human translators or machine translators. If you select a machine translator all your employee needs is a headphone that would be worn during the training, the translation is then received through the headphone while the training is ongoing. Machine translators are faster and more cost-effective, you should consider using them for your next multilingual employee training. Outsourcing might sound costly, but in reality, the main reason businesses utilize outsourcing is the ability to control expenses. When a specific sort of job is outsourced, the firm or organization is spared the expense of recruiting qualified individuals. How to reduce expenditures for your company by 10%, 20%, and 30% are detailed in a Harvard Business Review article. Outsourcing often only becomes an option when expenses are reduced by 20%–30%.

Translate all training manuals: While training your employees, it is necessary to make training manuals available for them so they can read them after the training and have a better understanding. You should therefore ensure that all training manuals and documents are translated into the language that each employee understands. For example, after you must have translated all training documents, a Spanish-speaking employee would be handed the Spanish version of the training manual while the French version is handed to your French-speaking employee. Not only training manual should be translated, other important manuals, graphics or pictures should be translated so that information is passed effectively to every department of your organization. This is to ensure that all employees are engaged and trained appropriately and impartially.

Train your managers in other languages: Translation will take a larger percentage of your company’s budget. Imagine having to employ professional translators every time you want to train your employees or having to print training manuals in multiple languages. The translation is not only time-consuming, but it is also capital consuming. So rather than spending all this money on translation, why not train your incentive managers to speak different languages? Training your managers to speak other languages certifies your organization as a global entity that has managers who can relate with anyone anywhere around the world. There are different resources online where your managers can learn other languages, some resources are free, while the paid ones are extremely affordable. Bottom line is, that training your managers to speak other languages will help you save money.

Many global brands struggle with employee engagement because of the language barrier caused by having employees from around the world. Because communication is necessary for every organization to achieve its aim, it is necessary that these brands find a way to communicate with their employees regardless of their language. While training employees in global organizations, translation is inevitable. Therefore if your organization has employees from all over the world and you want to ensure effective communication with every employee, the above-listed tips will help strengthen the communication process within your multilingual organization.