When I travel in non-English speaking countries, I wonder sometimes why companies do not hire native English speakers to make sense of their translations if they really want to cater to tourists.  My friend Jenny has a great blog post about Chinese restaurant menus and the great length the Chinese government is going to make sure that the Olympic tourists don’t see horrifying translations of food.  (A common one: “Husband and wife lung slices” for “pork in chili sauce.”  The main thing I wish when I travel, though, is that I knew the local language.
I saw a lot of the same thing today, with a different twist.  Many Indians speak English, but not fluently.  Indian English is sometimes a blend between Hindi and English—known as “Hinglish”—and for an organization to have credibility, Hinglish is sometimes an asset.
Today I was building the website for school entrepreneurs to apply for loans to our organization, and language was key.  I was working with Pushpraj, a  highly talented guy from Hyderabad, who attended a budget school and still lives in Hyderabad, to build the website.  And Pushpraj and I corrected each other—I wrote his sayings in complete English, and he translated mine for a hardly-English-speaking populace.  For example, when I was talking about loan “requirements”, he corrected me.  In Indian English, a “requirement” is a question: “I require your name” is “What is your name?”  So we changed it, at Pushpraj’s suggestion, to “criteria.”
Organizations have got to work with local partners to communicate.