Jay Lake: Writer

This whole “Make ‘English only’ mandatory for multinational corporations regardless of their country of origin” is typical monolingual American/British thinking. Try to imagine the outcry of employees of US companies should only speak – say Mandarin or German or French internally. Never mind that foreign companies operating in the US have never imposed such a decree on their US employees, because it would be ridiculous. The employees at the Mercedes Benz plant in Tuscaloosa, AL, speak English among themselves, as do employees of Random House and Pan Macmillan, both of which are German owned.

The overwhelming majority of companies operating internationally (not just multinational corporations either, but middle sized and small companies with international customers) have people who are reasonably competent in English among their management staff. And for situations that are too complex to handle, there are always qualified translators and interpreters.

But while it absolutely makes sense that managers, sales staff and sometimes technical service staff should speak English, I don’t see why e.g. assembly line workers or cleaning staff should have to speak only English among themselves. Besides, I strongly suspect that you will find plenty of cleaners or cafeteria workers working for US companies in the US who don’t speak English either, since cleaners are often recent immigrants.

BTW, some of the worst written documents I have seen as a translator originated with multinational companies that use English for internal communication, even though most employees are not native English speakers. As a result you get English language documents badly translated from whatever the author’s native language is, e.g. technical documents from Airbus/EADS tend to contain French grammatical structures.