The most valuable (and worthwhile) part of any cross-cultural engagement process is when we can combine our knowledge and expertise.
The most value I can generally bring to your project is either in this planning phase, as well as in active, collaborative work with people across languages and cultures (due to my own multilingual and cross-cultural capacity and experience). This will also mean that any translation work I do will be properly-targeted.
In my experience, being able to frame projects in language – in order to recognise the many nuanced cultural differences that are reflected by language and across different languages – adds tremendous value to any project that requires any sort of cross-cultural engagement. It can enable people to get on the same page much more quickly, and can stop a project from going in a completely wrong direction from the outset – saving a lot of time, effort, money and goodwill.
Designing a cross-cultural consult process in a way that ensures: key messages are understood and digested; people have time to think and be heard; and the consult is meaningfully undertaken; – is also an extremely challenging and nuanced undertaking.
By applying the linguistic lens from the outset for the planning, consults and project design, you’ll do a lot to: ensure the community’s voices are genuinely heard in consulting; ensure a project or activity design makes sense culturally and is actually something the community wants; finesse the form your project design process as well the project itself will take; and ultimately ensure the project be genuinely community-owned and thereby as successful as possible for all stakeholders.
Consulting and collaboration are the most valuable services I offer – it’s because they’re the most worth doing and getting right. Moreover, if I’m confident that this initial part of the process has been done adequately and properly, then the other services I offer tend to get cheaper (and be inherently much more efficient) as well.
Click here or go to my Contact page to get in touch and discuss!
