The shift in automotive manufacturing in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region to the east and to the south continues, exacerbated by the sluggish demand for EVs in Western Europe. Toyota has announced plans to start production of EVs at its Czech plant and Suzuki has expanded its capacity in Hungary. Japanese car parts suppliers such as Sumitomo Electric Industries and Yazaki now employ over 100,000 people in EMEA between them, mostly in Eastern Europe and North Africa.

Widening operations beyond Western Europe brings its own headaches from an HR and management perspective, however. Whereas in Western Europe even the French have become reconciled to having to use English as the common language, the level of English language ability in Eastern Europe or North Africa is low.

This impacts the ability of Japanese expatriate staff to communicate and train up locally hired employees. Localisation of management is therefore a necessity. But, as I recently experienced, providing training for those local managers is challenging – both in terms of having to cover multiple languages and multiple locations.

In some ways, technology provides the solution. During the pandemic I conducted several sessions online, in English, for managers working across the EMEA region in a Japanese automotive company. Their internet connectivity was not always reliable however. Trying to have group discussions with cameras switched on usually caused someone’s connection to crash. For many it was clearly a struggle to participate in English, too.

I was then asked to provide an e-learning version of this course, with subtitles in Arabic, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Spanish. I was hoping this would not be too difficult, if I used the increasingly sophisticated AI translation software available.  It did however prove to be challenging – both technically but also linguistically.

As I always emphasise in my face to face training sessions, cross cultural communication issues cannot just be resolved by having fluent English or Japanese speakers. The original communication has to be clear for a good translation to be made. Some understanding and empathy with the other person’s standpoint is also required to ensure the message lands correctly. Multilingual e-learning is certainly better than nothing, but it is not the whole solution.

This article first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 11th December 2024

Our multilingual team at Japan Intercultural Consulting offers training, online open seminars and e-learning in many languages, across all continents.