What does that even mean?

While meaningless marketing babble continues to flood into everyday English, another problem is being experienced in many foreign languages. A sprinkling of exotic terms from abroad (often, but not, always English) might seem cool (or easy) for the writer, but it can become a barrier to communication.

In the same way that Six Sigma analysis sometimes asks 'the five whys' to get to the root cause of a problem, we might as communication 'experts' ask ourselves 'but what does that actually mean?' - five times over, naturally. It would help us to root out pointless jargon put our point across more effectively.

And where foreign languages are concerned, it's useful to ask 'isn't there a word for that in our own language?' There probably is.

Keeping an open mind

We all have our own anecdotes about cultural stereotypes - think the HSBC campaign of a few years ago about a man at a Japanese dinner. But when I look back at my own experiences I wonder how much of them were down to the foibles of the individual rather than a representative cultural difference.

Friends have told me about Indian businesses keeping bad news from customers ‘for fear of worrying them, and Chinese giving them the jitters because they proffer minimal information in the run up to major events. Both would appear very different to a western textbook model of business communications.

Personally I’ve had Finnish customers who refused lunch as a waste of their time and Korean clients who had an uncanny awareness of where certain items were to be found in a facility that they had never visited in their lives. And then there are Japanese who are in the office at all hours … and Americans who are never at their desks when I telephone.

So what has it taught me? Nothing much … except to keep an open mind.