The CrossEuropean Localisations
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- Created on Tuesday, July 03 2012 07:01
The CrossEuropean Translations is created as a spin-off from the CrossEuropean Project Management.
It is my personal project, so it is deeply connected to my own experience in marketing, management and administration, in the automotive and hotel industry.
Having produced some multilingual business plans for my customers in green energy business and done the consulting to companies expanding on the Benelux markets during the last two years, I have noticed one particular added value of my service: vast improvement of my clients’ cross-border communication.
But the way to that point was long, starting in 1989.
Working for Hilton in the first half of the 90’s, I gradually came to understand how very important it was to give the customer a feeling of proximity. I was so much more successful when my client in Toulouse, The Hague or Munich had a feeling to talk to somebody round the corner, though I was sitting in my Brussels office. I then developed an efficient way not only to translate but to formulate business letters differently for each of my customer groups in six European language areas.
Car business, my field from the second half of the nineties, is mostly driven by people with some petrol in their blood. Still, their marketing messages are produced by specialists not necessarily so deep in the car business, and later translated by professionals who might be even further from the field. As Product manager at the Renault Slovenia, I witnessed how very the original message could sometimes be watered down on its way from Paris to Ljubljana.
After joining the Renault Paris Headquarters, I once had privilege to talk to the then CEO Louis Schweitzer, a man of enormous wisdom. He enlightened me how things can sometimes get lost in translation – as it happened at the time of the misfortunate takeover operation of a major Swedish car brand. What happened? You can imagine how delicate it is to keep communication efficient between individuals of so different cultures as are the French executives on one side and their silent Swedish counterparts on the other. While the former tended to understand their silence as a Nordic way of saying Yes, the latter mostly had a “Mitt svar är: nej! “ in their mind. How very delicate job for a translator and how much more than a mere translation is sometimes needed to channel the discussion in a good way!
Some of my experiences that followed were quite unique and have sharpened my senses for communication in multicultural environment - such as being the Pricing & Forecast Manager for the EU-markets at the Renault SA Headquarters, or Head of the Business Planning at the Deutsche Renault, Head of Sales & Marketing at the Porsche financial services, project manager at the ALPOS Group, as well as running my own CrossEuropean Project Management.
Every single of these steps has given me specific expertise, rich enough to give this new CrossEuropean spin-off a very special character. This is why the CrossEuropean Translation services can today be so sensible, efficient and end user oriented.
