Language Barrier: A Threat in Outsourcing

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Language barrier is a big problem when the US and UK based companies attempt to form a partnerships outside their countries. They have presumed that if they were to outsource to other countries like India, the language barrier would cause a problem. India has 29 states and over 17 dialects--most similar to Hindi or Sanskrit. The workforce consists of locales in which English is only a second language. India is the leading outsourcing country worldwide. Most of the companies that outsourced in this country are US based.

In outsourcing call center jobs, language plays a major role. Such requires clear understanding of the language, proper enunciation/accent and fluent speaking in formal language.

It also is argued that the language problem considerably affects the process of internet adoption. Internet diffusion has already reached the majority of computer-oriented and well-educated segments of the population. However, the forthcoming segments (and nations) are much less familiar with the English language.

The World Wide Web has completely increased the use of computer-arbitrate communication. The economic globalization process has also noticeably enhanced. However, majority (70%) of the content in the web is in English; 4 percent in German, 5 percent is in Japanese, and only 20 percent in other languages.

Therefore, we should give importance to this issue by giving some ideas. We must first address the issue of internet growth. Some standard models for distribution of the innovations should be applied for two basic indicators of Internet penetration: the number of hosts per habitants and the percentage of population using the Internet. In the next step, the attitude toward English as the Internet language is to be studied. The results from international surveys should be presented, and some other specific studies be discussed.   


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This page contains a single entry by Kenneth James B. Villegas published on June 18, 2008 11:39 AM.

The Impact of US Dollar Downfall to Outsourcing was the previous entry in this blog.

Canadian Companies: Opting To Outsource in the Philippines is the next entry in this blog.

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