Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Middle Man

There's not much of a point to this post. But, I have a meeting tomorrow to negotiate a potential joint venture between my US client and a foreign company. For the first time in my career I have to have a translator. I'm wondering how that will affect the dynamics. Should be interesting.

4 comments:

Life Hiker said...

What fun! A translator. You're in the big time now. Or, does this mark the time in history when all American companies need a foreign partner to survive?

Keith said...

Hey Dave,

I gave a talk to the orphanage once and had a translator. It was very wierd to me doing this. It made me keep losing my train of thought. I always had to stop after a couple of sentences to let him interpret. It really disrupted the flow of my talk.

Anyhow, good luck and I would be interested in what you thought of the experience.

Keith

Anonymous said...

You better hope that the translator really works for you and not the other guy.

Posol'stvo the Medved said...

Years ago we did a project for a Japanese owned firm in NYC. We really could have used a translator for that one. Language barriers really screwed up the whole requirements definition phase.

In the end, I acted as a translator of sorts -- translating their English into English that was comprehensible to most American English speakers...