From its beginning as a mixture of Scandinavian languages, French, German, Celtic, Latin and Greek, English has always been an international language. When Shakespeare was writing, only 6 million people spoke the language.
However, with industrialisation, combined with the British Empire and the international influence of the United States, the use of English has become pervasive in all cultures of the world. English is the in which all of the world’s top 50 films in terms of box office revenue were filmed. The same goes for the most popular songs. But more than 90% of all the world’s scientific journals are written in English. And of course the dominance of business also applies to business.
Potential problems
Unfortunately, for native English-speakers, the idea of English as a lingua franca can create a false sense of security: if foreigners are learning my language, then I don’t/won’t have to learn theirs. Data from UK shows this to be true to a catastrophic extent.
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Universities offering degrees in all modern foreign languages decreased from 105 in 2000 to 62 in 2013, a downturn of 40%.
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In addition to the 43 universities that have already dropped modern foreign language, at least 20 more universities will axe modern language departments over the next decade.
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There has been a 13% year-over-year decline in the number of British students pursuing a degree in a modern foreign language. To put things into the bleak perspective, there were only 4,800 students who started a modern language degree in Great Britain in 2013.
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The Foreign Office, which is a magnet for and requires a constant flow of modern foreign language graduates, has been forced to establish its own language school in order to produce civil servants who can communicate adequately in a foreign language.
What does this mean for business?
As everyone knows, making it in the business world is about taking advantage of opportunity. It is true that English is the lingua franca understood at least to some extent by 1.75 billion people worldwide, approximately a quarter of the world’s population. But conversely, approximately 75% do not understand any English at all. Obviously, cutting out 75% of the global market based on language is not the best way to take advantage of all available opportunities. Therefore, the question that needs to be asked is: with a rapidly declining number of modern foreign language specialists who are being more highly sought after, how can a business be assured of attracting and retaining the talent that it needs in order to take advantage of all opportunities globally?
In order to position itself in the best possible way from an economic, logistic, and synergistic perspective, business need to take advantage of the services offered by a reliable, accredited translation company.
EVS Translations is an international translation company. Every year we translate and interpret into over 100 languages. For this reason, trust our team for your multilingual translation and multilingual interpreting projects.
