Imagine you’re hosting a global team meeting where several attendees have limited English proficiency. How productive will that meeting be? Now imagine trying to sell your products or service to someone who isn’t fully comfortable communicating in English. How likely are they to move forward?

When employees or customers can’t fully understand your message, engagement drops and problems arise.

Today, most organizations operate across regions, cultures, and languages. Multilingual communication isn’t a nice-to-have anymore — it’s a strategic lever for productivity, engagement, and growth.

With real-time multilingual business translation and interpretation, Sorenson Forum helps teams and customers understand each other clearly, no matter the language.

The true cost of language barriers

Friction in business communication isn’t just inconvenient — it can be expensive. Here are some of the ways inefficient communication and language barriers can harm your bottom line:

Lost productivity — Slow or inefficient translation can have a compounding effect. Even a relatively minor miscommunication can quickly spiral into hours of explanation and rework. Workflows get disrupted as employees ask for clarification.

Multilingual meetings and presentations powered by Sorenson Forum minimize confusion and ensure everyone’s on the same page — even if they’re not all speaking the same language.  

Lost business opportunities — In many industries, competitive growth is fueled by international deals — the kind that 64% of businesses say they’ve missed due to a lack of multilingual employees.  

With real-time translation from Sorenson Forum, in-person and virtual meetings can easily cross language barriers, setting your organization up for greater international success.

Lost employee participation — When language barriers within a company go unaddressed, a surge in employee turnover is often soon to follow. Employees who don’t feel heard or understood give minimal effort or just leave entirely. Happy and engaged employees are more productive and often identify new and useful solutions or processes.  

Sorenson Forum doesn’t just help those employees feel heard; it can help their ideas and input reach the decision makers who can enact them.

Missed customers — By only communicating in one language, businesses voluntarily cut themselves off from huge pools of potential customers.

Real-time translation and interpretation enable you to tell new customers about your business while demonstrating your commitment to customer service and clear communication.

Breakdowns in communication are clearly a risk to any business. Fortunately, real-time translation, interpretation, and captioning can help you mitigate those risks, foster greater collaboration and connection, and avoid some of those negative outcomes.

Getting started with live multilingual translation

Every company and organization has unique needs when it comes to multilingual translation.  

• Perform a communication audit. Review your internal communication policies and practices, as well as key external touchpoints. This Communication Accessibility Checklist can help you identify where communication is working effectively, where it can be improved, and where potential major breakdowns might happen.
• Download A Modern Guide to Multilingual Communication at Scale. This comprehensive guide covers why multilingual communication matters, how live translation compares to other solutions, and what to look for in a translation tool.
• Identify high-impact areas for translation and captioning. Many organizations choose to implement new technologies in phases. Based on your audit, where will multilingual translation have the biggest or most immediate impact on your business? For example, your company might field a lot of customer service calls from diverse communities, or you may be expanding into a new region with a heavily bilingual community.
• Get internal buy-in. The points made in this article and in the Guide should help you make your case to internal decision-makers. Once you have selected a solution, be sure that all team members are properly trained and comfortable using it, to promote quick adoption and get the best results.

The language of success

In today’s world, multilingual communication is not just the right thing to do — it’s a business necessity. The ability to reach more potential customers and avoid costly miscommunications is a strategic advantage growth-minded businesses can’t afford to pass up.