Translation bloomers are bad for Yorkshire and Humber region businesses, warns the Department of Trade & Industry.

And many companies are experiencing setbacks as a direct result of not knowing the local language. Nearly one-third of small and medium-sized companies in the North have come up against a language or cultural barrier, resulting in loss of trade.

One apocryphal story concerns auditors who were going through a Yorkshire company's affairs after it had gone into liquidation, when it came across a letter written in German. When translated, it turned out to be the largest order the company had ever received, and would have saved the day if only someone had been able to understand it.

Another involves an hydraulic rams manufacturer which proudly boasted in overseas promotional literature about their "watery sheep." Meanwhile, a major washing powder company overlooked the fact that in Arabic, sentences are transposed. It told its customers to "put your clean washing in the machine and out comes this dirty grey material!"

Even giants of international commerce can run into trouble. Coca-Cola found out that in Chinese its brand-name sounds like "bite the wax tadpole." Pepsi fared no better in Taiwan: Its slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead." But such gaffes are no laughing matter for the person whose business suffers as a result. Billions of pounds in revenue are lost to UK companies each year due to lack of international language skills and failure to overcome cultural barriers.

Where UK companies once traded largely with the Commonwealth and the USA, today more than 60 per cent of our exports go to non-English speaking countries, with Germany our biggest export market.

Looking to the future, the greatest prospects of growth lie in the Pacific Rim, East Asia, South America and Eastern Europe - virtually all non-English speaking.

Help is at hand in the shape of a new British Trade International guide. Overcoming language and cultural barriers in business: a guide for exporters is designed to give practical advice on how to establish a communications strategy.

It includes details of funding and support available, such as a British Trade International-sponsored Business Language Review, in which a consultant visits a company to carry out an audit of its existing language skills and an assessment of its needs.

For your copy telephone 0171 2158146 or via the website http://www.dti.gov.uk/ots/languages for export/

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