True Story 1.05
European business school lecturer encounters a surprise
The setting for this story
Geert was raised bilingually by a French-speaking father and an English-speaking mother. After a career in business, Geert lectured once each week at a European business school – in English in the morning and in French during the afternoon. Below, Geert describes his teaching experiences.
A story of misaligned minds6
I used one case study each week. The English version of a case was given to my morning group, the French version to my afternoon group. With each group, I encouraged a lively discussion about that day’s case.
You might assume the discussions about each case in English and French were similar. They weren’t.
With my English-speaking group, each case was discussed in largely pragmatic terms. Before long, one of the students asked, “So what?” and the conversation turned to the practical steps the company should have taken.
With my French speakers, each case regularly led to a stimulating intellectual debate. No one ever asked, Et alors? (So what?), and few, if any, practical suggestions were made.
That’s not all. When the English speakers got a case translated from French, they groused that, “This case is incredibly verbose, with a skimpy message that needed only two pages.” When the French-speakers got a case translated from English, they criticized it in almost identical terms!
Geert’s question
Why do translated versions of the same business case always lead to very different discussions?
Critique of story 1.05
“Information” is more than words, data, and other symbols on a page. Those symbols are just squiggles until they’re given meanings by humans whose minds are thinking within a framework of meaning provided by their society’s culture. Each culture’s framework gives the people definitional meanings of the squiggles and conditions them to expect details to be presented in a certain way and with certain emphases. A culture’s framework also provides value-laden emotional meanings for various squiggles.
Equipped with meanings, people use the squiggles to communicate information and intentions, even disagreements, with others with whom they share a framework of meaning.
For thought
Most of this book’s seventy-six stories describe complications between people from “Western” and “non-Western” societies separated by thousands of miles and living in vastly different ways. This story describes the actions of people from societies that are both “Western,” have very similar ways of life, and are separated by a channel that’s only twenty-one miles wide. Nonetheless, their peoples have misaligned frameworks of meaning – misalignments that are not corrected simply by translation of informative materials.
Related stories
Story 1.12concerns the differences between British and German businesspeople’s expectations about corporate training sessions. Stories 4.06 and 7.16 involve cultural complications that similarly arose in business education settings.
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Endnotes:
6 Hofstede, 315–16.
All full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.