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The provision of cultural support and language advice to businesses plays a vital role in international trade as well as ensuring safety and accord in multilingual workplaces back at home.

For example would you know how to charm your Japanese partners, settle a dispute in the workplace between non-English speaking employees or know how to react if your South African contacts invited you to a braai?

Businesses in the West Midlands can contact the RLN for help in breaking down cultural and language barriers. The RLN provides language advice, access to language resources and services and signposting to other useful organisations.

If you don’t know what to do or say when visiting other countries or conversing with non-English speaking clients, the Regional Language Network offers a range of free language resources to help you get to grips with the language and culture of a variety of countries.

To enable you to forge strong business relationships and steer clear of cultural misunderstandings, the Regional Language Network provides cultural briefings on a range of countries including France, Brazil, Malaysia, China and Russia. These guides cover business culture, the basics of the language and information on the economy and geography of the country. Cultural matters are often overlooked as businesses focus first on learning the language, but understanding the differences in the local business culture and being able to demonstrate respect to your overseas contacts is just as important as showing off the basic phrases you have learned.

And it’s not just overseas…language and cultural differences within the workplace can prevent your business from running smoothly. It is worthwhile you seeking language advice from an organisation such as the RLN West Midlands if you employ migrant workers.

If you have multilingual or migrant workers it is important to recognise the language barriers and cultural differences that will prevent effective communication. To ensure your workplace runs smoothy you will need to make sure, for example, that health and safety information is presented in the appropriate languages and that workers whose first language is not English or those who cannot understand it very well can access interpreters or mentors to assist them in work-related matters.

Learn more about Language Advice at the RLN West Midlands website