One conversation, many languages

The situation

You are settling a delivery date with a supplier abroad. Your operations manager in Hamburg writes German, the supplier's contact in Barcelona writes Spanish, and you write English. So far it has been a fortnight of half-understood emails, each run through a translation tool, and nobody sure what was agreed.

What you want is one conversation where every person writes the way they think and reads the way they read.

What you need

A chat all of you can get to. Nothing else: nothing to install, no languages to set in advance.

In practice that is one chat in the web app the room can type into: a laptop on the meeting-room table, a shared screen on a call, or you relaying what the other side sends.

The conversation

Open a chat and say something like this.

"Be our interpreter for this. I am Tom and I write English, Katrin writes German, Nuria writes Spanish. Translate everything any of us says into the other two languages."

You do not have to list anybody: say "be our interpreter" and let people arrive. When a message turns up in a language nobody has used yet, your assistant replies in that language, asks their name, then tells the room who is here and what each writes, saying up front how strong it is in each.

Then everyone writes. Katrin types in German, and the other two see this.

EN (for Tom): The pallets can leave on the ninth if the paperwork is signed by Friday. ES (para Nuria): Los palés pueden salir el día nueve si la documentación está firmada el viernes.

Your own words are never read back to you, and nothing is wrapped around the translations.

Say something to one person. Put their name in front and only they get it. "@Nuria quick aside, is the ninth genuinely possible or are you being polite?" reaches Nuria in Spanish alone; nobody else sees a translation that turn.

Come back after stepping out. Say you are lost, in whichever language you write, and the last stretch comes back summarised in that language, by subject, with names against who said what. Only you see it.

Formality is carried across, not flattened. If Nuria addresses you as usted the translation keeps that distance, and if Katrin is on du terms with her colleague it stays that way. Say "keep it formal with Nuria" and it holds to that; where it cannot tell, it leans formal.

It asks rather than guesses. "Tell him it is fine" hides two questions: which him, and fine as in pleased or fine as in tolerable. Rather than pick one and pass it on, your assistant asks you alone, and the others see nothing until you answer.

You can talk to it as well as through it. "Switch me to Portuguese", "pause the translating" and "Katrin has left, drop her" are instructions to it, not things to relay. It acts on them quietly, telling the room only when somebody joins, leaves or changes language.

What you end up with

The chat holds the lot: every message as it was written, with the translations beside it, so all three of you can read it back afterwards in your own language. A call with an interpreter never leaves you that. Ask for what was agreed and you get it once per language, ready to send on.

Make it yours

Stop briefing it every time. Once you have run it a few times, ask it to remember how you like this done: who is usually in the room, which languages, how formal with whom. Teaching it turns that into something your assistant simply knows, so a standing thread with the same customer abroad never starts from nothing.

Give it your own vocabulary. Names, brands, links and codes are left alone already. Tell it the rest: your product names, the part numbers, the internal word that should never come back translated.

Speak instead of typing. A message recorded with the mic in the chat becomes text before the translator reads it, so a spoken turn is handled like a written one. Voice has to be set up first: see Voice.

Where it struggles

Language strength is not even: widely written languages come out well, while less widely written ones come out stiff, idioms break and names get mangled. Your assistant says which it is, fluent, good or limited, as it adds each person, and where it is limited it adds a note on its confidence. Moving to a stronger model usually helps, and you pick that from a dropdown: see Models.

Who is in the room is held in that one conversation: start a fresh chat and you introduce everybody again, and after a long session it is worth restating the list.

Numbers, dates, times and prices stay as written unless you ask for them converted, since a converted price is a guess about an exchange rate.

This lives in a chat rather than inside a WhatsApp or Telegram group; the version that sits in a group thread is not built yet. If your people are on a group today, you are the bridge.

Related

• Talk to it, for the other ways in.
• Chat, for the conversation itself.
• Channels and communication, for connected apps.
• Teaching it, for making this a habit.