International Mother Language Day Safeguarding Linguistic Diversity

We all love to communicate preferably in our mother tongue. No matter in which situation – private or professional context – it is where we ‘feel at home’ and can understand and express ourselves best. In the end, I believe that the diversity of languages makes our interactions and relationships interesting.

Addressing customers worldwide with a global support team

What does this mean for the best interaction of my Customer Solution Support and Innovation team at SAP – over 9,000 people strong – serving SAP customers across 145 countries?

Customers expect software – especially in the cloud – to offer multiple languages out of the box, not more and not less. SAP has a long history of localizing our solutions. When we deliver support to a customer, being able to have the conversation in their native language is what we aim for.

But even beyond a human-to-human interaction we strive for providing our services as personalized as possible. We offer automatic translation tools in our Expert Chat and support incident conversations. They help to break down language barriers between regions, countries and cultures by offering automatic translation of content ‘on the fly’ with machine learning enabled functionality – a win in many cases as it builds the bridge to the native languages of our customers.

With this, we are able to engage with a user in her or his mother tongue, even when providing a human-to-machine interaction via chatbots or other AI and machine learning based features.

The bigger picture – preserving our linguistic heritage

Let’s look at our world for a moment. To me, personally, preserving cultures, knowledge societies and other heritages includes fostering and maintaining linguistic diversity in our private and professional lives.

So, what can we do to preserve linguistic diversity, offer multilingual education, and grow awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions across the globe to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue?

• Let’s not forget about the importance of languages and the impact they have on our lives, our societies and our global intercultural engagements.
• Appreciate the linguistic and cultural diversity and its value.
• Let’s help to keep the cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue going and growing.
• Think of a language you always wanted to learn or get better at. It will add so much more to your life than just speaking a foreign language. Having lived in many different continents of the world, I personally always found it very rewarding when engaging with local people in their own language, even if I could only speak a few words.

So join me in supporting and safeguarding linguistic diversity while overcoming language barriers and honoring the importance and impact of mother languages.

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