One of the important aspects of a multicultural society is coexistence. People must get ideas from people from near and far. After all, all people have similar needs that require homogeneous solutions in one way or another.
In a multicultural society, everyone is a resource. For this reason, anyone has the potential to solve your needs. However, sometimes those from afar use a native language you barely know. However, their ideology sometimes features the solution you have been looking for. What do you do in such an instance?
The answer lies in translation. Admittedly, people outside your socially popular circle can use symbols and gestures to speak to you. However, those modes of communication are deficient. In other words, such methods can fail to communicate with clarity. It takes translation to make one understand all the communication cues of a person from a different ethnic background.
In a nutshell, translation creates an understandable substitute language in the place of a native language. In return, people from different cultures exchange information, conversations, and ideas without encountering a language barrier.
What can happen in the absence of translation in a multicultural society?
Lack of translation causes misunderstanding and confusion and sometimes creates confusion due to using unacceptable words or phrases. Also, a lack of translation can hamper the realization of a mutual consensus during bilateral or international conflict resolution activities.
The Need for Translation in a Multicultural Society
Given the need for coexistence in a multicultural society, what are the roles of translation in building relationships? In such a scenario, some of the roles of translation are as follows:
Learning Local the Local Cultural Values and Customs
To coexist, all members of a multicultural society must teach each other their cultural values and customs. This strategy is the only way of creating deep interpersonal connections and relationships. As a recap, people need similar things. For this reason, cultures are quite similar. It is only that various cultural descriptions differ because of the language used.
Overall, everyone needs a family, comfortable life, a meaningful life, and food. These are some ingredients of a happy life that everyone wishes for. However, how people relate determines the level of happiness they get in life.
Notably, cultural relationships apply to business relationships besides interpersonal relationships. In some regions, a business deal must start with mingling before discussing serious business issues. The main objective of such beginnings is to identify how best one can be without pursuing any personal interests.
For these reasons, one must be open, vulnerable, and friendly to everyone for them to create a cultural relationship. However, it would help if you learned the culture of the people you want to relate with. Otherwise, your encounter can’t be successful without understanding the cultural dos and don’ts or the people you intend to relate with.
Overcoming Cultural Differences
Cultural differences can hamper social relationships immensely. In some global regions, people always pursue personal gains and interests. Such a cultural aspect makes it easy for entrepreneurs to thrive. It also makes it easy to do business with people with such a cultural orientation.
However, other global regions have people who believe in collective benefits. Such people prioritize collectivism and communism. In such a social setup, people do things to benefit others more than themselves. If you encounter such a social setup as an entrepreneur, it can be difficult for you to thrive.
From a business perspective, knowing the cultural differences within a multicultural society helps you determine your target audience. Absolutely, you cannot fulfill the needs of everyone in a multicultural society. For this reason, you must apply a positive audience separation in any quest to fulfill your business objectives.
One of the strategies that can make you thrive in a multicultural society is identifying the nature of the message to send to your target audience. The intended message must feature the appropriate cultural orientation to appeal to and convince your target audience to act positively in response to your business offerings.
How can you communicate well in a society with cultural differences? The solution lies in being open-minded, appreciative of cultural differences, and knowing how to communicate effectively.
Given the need to overcome cultural differences, especially when doing business, localisation services come in handy when researching the cultural aspects of your target audience. You must understand the business behavior of your target audience and how you can respond to different cues.
If you understand how to do business differently with people from other cultures, you are in for a cordial relationship with almost anyone in the world.
Achieving Cultural Relevance
Cultural relevance refers to fitting into a culture that is different from yours. In other words, you gain a status of respect in an unfamiliar society. In return, you get to enjoy all the privileges of the locals, including respect from everyone.
How do you achieve cultural relevance? You achieve it by doing your things the local way. To become local in all you do, you must learn the dos and don’ts of your subject culture. You must know the words to use when speaking to the young and old, eating habits, salutation, and how to act independently whenever you are in a crowd.
Notably, doing things differently can sometimes be offensive to your host culture. By differently, we mean doing things the way you are not supposed to do them. For example, you must know the words to use when amidst older adults. If you use the wrong word, you can earn a lock-out from an occasion or event. Also, the worst that can happen is living in seclusion.
How can you avoid the repercussions of cultural segregation? You can do it by getting a translation of your target audience’s cultural way of life.
Translation can turn you from being a stranger into becoming a local. In return, you can know your way easily among strangers and get a solution to any problem you encounter. Better still, you can gain the respect accorded to people of your stature.
Distribution of Knowledge
Typically, gaining knowledge is knowing something you did not previously know. We must learn what is happening daily in the world, which is also a multicultural hub. Life is changing very fast. Positively, some life changes make our lives more comfortable and convenient.
Notably, most inventions and innovations feature authors from a culture unfamiliar to us. However, the convenience of what inventors and innovators make benefits everyone.
How can we tap into a foreign invention or innovation’s benefits? It is by translating the processes and outcomes from the two exercises. In return, anyone from anywhere can make efforts to find the materials and replicate the new processes or order the finished products and ready services.
The world is full of success stories that depict some inventions and innovations that helped the entire human race. How did everyone learn about the said exercises despite the geographical and language differences?
Translation partly played an integral role in creating understandable content. Such translated content highlighted the much-needed knowledge that transformed even some of the world’s remotest parts.
In the absence of translation, the world can feature naïve and involuntarily selfish people. Each global community can depend on its own resources to thrive because sharing resources cannot be easy.
Even if sharing can be possible, some global communities in the fictional pre-translation era cannot know what to do with the resources. In the worst-case scenario, such communities could use gold to sharpen their knives (pun intended).
It takes translation to share wisdom and knowledge. The outcome of this aspect is a multicultural community that benefits from the resources each community member possesses.
Translation Drives Business Relationships
We cannot say much without highlighting money and how to generate it. Regardless of its currency nature, money is the oil that greases the global economy. Notably, the world is a perfect example of a multicultural society. Without translation, how can international trade thrive?
It is also notable to know that there is a significant global disparity regarding resource distribution. Some parts of the world boast of their valuable resources but cannot be independent. Such regions still need minor but highly-needed resources from other parts of the world.
Given that no part of the world can become independent resource-wise, translation comes in handy during the exchange of resources. This activity is what we call a business. A region without resources found in another region must purchase the resources from the region that has them. How can such a trade deal close? It is through the application of translation services.
Translation can help one explain their needs in a foreign business deal and get a solution that satisfies the presented need.
The Bottom Line
According to TW Languages, a language Service provider (LSP), it is impossible for a multicultural society, or the world, to survive or thrive without translation services. These services are handy in almost every aspect of such a communal existence. From interpersonal relationships to business models, translation is integral to a multicultural society.