How to manage non-English-speaking customers?

Question

What are the best practices when managing a software project involving a non-English-speaking client?

What communication issues are relevant? Would you maintain documentation in both languages (especially updating the specifications regularly)?

Answer 1

The basic risk in such type of projects is miscommunication, so the top priority is validating the understanding of both parties, i.e. you should not only validate that the customer understand what you say - you must also validate that you understand what the customer says. Then, with the explicit goal of validating communications and based on the resources you have to understand your customer's language and the resources your customer has to understand your language, you and your customer shall agree on how to handle communications for the project: documentation in both languages, single points of contact, written minutes of all communications, translation of all communications, etc.

To minimize the possibility of misunderstandings, it is better to have all official communications in just one language, if possible. If communications shall be held in more than one language, you must minimize the number of communication channels, i.e. you must not have everybody communicating with everybody else: liaisons should be designated to handle all communications. Single points of contact with known proficiency on the language(s) used in the project are crucial.

Casual communications shall be avoided. All conference calls and meetings shall have written minutes describing all agreements and action items - if multiple languages are being used, all minutes shall be translated by a single party and reviewed by the single point(s) of contact.

The practices I have just described, may seem an ugly burden to bear, but they will prevent a lot of headaches.

Good luck!

Answer 2

My native language is not English, so I'm on the other side. There were times when we had to write project documents in 4-6 languages.

Try to find somebody who understand English (like a key person). I try to avoid the communication in different languages on a project. Of course you can talk and write on different languages with project members, but if you talk or write to all members of the project at once, it should be one language.

Documentation should be maintained in as many languages as many involved. All documents should be updated on a regular basis and try to avoid the situation when you have to tell them that "the English is the current one". Find someone who is native in the target language and translate from English for you. It will be far more better, understandable, and more native than if you try the other way around.

Answer 3

This might be the perfect case in which you might want to switch over to Agile development. This puts less of an emphasis on large amounts of documents and you can provide work at the end of every interval for the customer to sign off on. If you don't know what Agile is, just google it, you'll get tons of information back.

Answer 4

Always follow up with a written confirmation of any verbal discussion. Most people can read foreign languages better then they can speak them. It also helps to pick one language as the standard for all documents and code.