The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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Vol/53 No/2 2014 APRiL/MAY The Linguist 7 FEATURES How the language policy of IMB distributor Europlus Direct has secured its success around the world Europlus Direct is based in the UK but has offices around the world. In what languages do you communicate? We communicate in French and English with the Mauritian office; wholly in French with the Dakar office; English for namibia; and Portuguese in Mozambique. For coordination between global offices we do tend to use English as a lingua franca, but as i speak French we have many meetings in French, particularly if one of our staff members feels more comfortable with French than English. You recently set up offices in Senegal, Mozambique and Namibia. How do you plan which new territories to extend into? We do extensive market research and work closely with our client, iBM, to ascertain which markets to go for. We look for growth potential and limited competition. We have an in-house matrix we use to work out where to go next. We work with our accountants, Mazars, in Africa to ensure that profits can be repatriated, and we also take note of the corruption index. And it can happen that we set up in a country due to serendipity, as a quote request can come from anywhere. With 96% of sales coming from overseas markets, how do you communicate with clients in non-English-speaking countries? Always by employing native language speakers in our offices. At our Leeds hQ we have 25 European native language speakers in-house. We always translate our website into local languages. We never expect our customers to speak a second language to our staff, if at all possible. if you force a non- native speaker to speak English it makes it very difficult to sell to them. For customer support, we cover 14 languages in-house. How do you localise your advertising for different markets? All our marketing is done by our sister company, one Global, which offers translation services, transcreation and localised digital marketing. We are all in the same building and one Global has more than 2,000 translators. How many of your staff members are multilingual? 75 percent – it is essential that staff members speak more than one language, except our Accounts department. French, German and Spanish are the main languages but chinese is also creeping up. In the countries where Europlus Direct is a distributor, how is distribution coordinated? We have staff in countries where we are a distributor. in African countries where we don't have an on-the-ground presence this is run from our African hQ in Mauritius. The language use is split 50/50, French and English. So English in Zimbabwe, South Africa and namibia, and French in the Democratic Republic of congo, Madagascar and Senegal, for example. Is your website localised for the different markets? it is localised for French and German, and we are doing chinese currently. Translation is done by a native living in the target country, plus keywords and SEo (search engine optimisation). For the chinese site we are looking at the use of correct colours and ensuring numbers are laid out correctly. Jim Hart is CEO of Europlus Direct. Trade secrets If you force a non- native speaker to speak English it makes it very difficult to sell to them. We cover 14 languages GLOBAL REACH Jim Hart (right) with members of the team