Companies fare badly with foreign language e-mail

April 26, 2001

Only eight per cent of British companies could respond correctly to foreign language emails, a rating much worse than French or German companies, according to a new survey.

Online translation company Worldlingo says business is being lost due to the poor results. There were 247 test e-mails sent in different languages and more than 90 per cent of the world's largest companies couldn’t respond correctly, the report stated. Many companies didn’t even recognise the mail as a foreign message and responded in English that the email was corrupt. About 69 per cent did not respond at all.

Worldlingo is promoting its new software system designed to translate e-mails.

Australian companies came last in the survey with a score of zero.

Angela Hall is assistant editor of Europemedia.net. She previously worked as a daily news reporter in Canada for the Edmonton Journal. Angela holds a journalism degree from Carleton University.

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