Why You’re Already Multilingual, and How It Can Help Your Business

Photo by Plutor.

No matter what our background, most of us can speak a foreign language. One that’s completely opaque to anyone who might be listening in. It’s the language of your industry.

So what’s your second language? Is it ‘web dev’? (Take this quick quiz – have you ever used the words ‘CSS’, ‘XHTML’, ‘sFIR3′ or ‘Javascript’ face-to-face with a client?). Or do you lapse into ‘designer’ or ‘blogger’ when you get excited?

Whatever your second language is, chances are either you or your clients are losing something vital in the translation. Every industry creates jargon, acronyms and product-words that aren’t in any dictionary, and mean nothing to outsiders. And then individual companies have their own variations on the dialect.

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