The ins and outs of international cooperation

Online, you can find as many articles about doing business in various countries as you want. Differences in public holidays, favorite places to spend vacations, duration of a working day etc. And yet the statistics is usually pushed aside by real working experience.

What are stereotypes about business in the USA? Americans always have a serious attitude towards work and hide their true emotions behind the wide smile, keeping business matters among their major priorities. There’s nothing to argue about: while working with big American companies, we made sure that they are truly reliable partners. Multinational teams solve all the issues as soon as possible to fix the working process rapidly and achieve desired results. You can always make up an opinion on a company based on its payment policy – Americans are responsible in this regard too. We addressed Chief Financial Officer with a notification about payment delay, and everything was done to remedy the situation. We received payments even for those jobs that had not been overdue yet.

What about Italian companies, then? Everybody knows Italians’ ardent southern temperament; this works with their attitude to business too. Such partners can be passionate, hot-tempered and occasionally inconsequent; they abandon work for the hot August and usually spend the whole month on vacations; and problem solving may sometimes be time-consuming and demanding your persistence. Perhaps, you will have to contact your Italian partners several times via email and phone, until the issue (i.e. receivables) is resolved. Nevertheless, Lingvista has been actively working with Italian partners since 2013; it was enough time to get used to each other’s peculiarities, understand each other’s needs and requirements and build up an effective and mutually beneficial cooperation.

Besides, we know some tricks about dealing with long-term partners from other countries: for example, China and Israel. The thing is, all terms and conditions should be clarified beforehand, as well as special instructions of every task; rates and means of payment. It would save you from unexpected troubles upon completing a project. Once we have not cleared up all the requirements in a multimedia project for our Chinese customer; thus, we had to reconsider the word count after the work was done, cause our customer wanted us to eliminate seconds of silence between characters’ lines from the final statistics. This is not how it’s usually done in subtitles translation, so initially we didn’t really believe such a requirement was real. But it was, obviously – so we had to work hard to meet this demand for the sake of cost reduction for the client.

Anyway, cooperation with foreign companies helps develop a business and rise team competence to the higher level of proficiency. Learning about peculiarities of dealing with partners from abroad enriches our experience and lets us discover more about ourselves. Cheers for international communication!