So you’ve decided that telephone interpretation is important for your company in order to communicate with your contacts in India or Pakistan. Well then, you’ve probably chosen to work with an interpreter fluent in Hindustani, which is an obvious decision. But is that decision the right one?
A cursory search of the world’s most common languages will render Hindustani in third place, with an estimated 497 million speakers, placing it behind only Mandarin and English. However, looking more closely at the language of Northern India and Pakistan reveals that Hindustani is not so much a widespread language in its own right as it is a standardized dialect, used in common between multiple language communities.
Properly speaking, linguists consider Hindustani the lingua franca of its native region, with two standard varieties: Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu. In essential terms, Hindustani is a standard Hindi-Urdu dialect derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi. Hindustani is the language of Bollywood and, through its use in modern entertainment and mainstream media, it has become the broadcast language of an entire sub-continent.
To understand Hindustani in its native context, think of the English you might hear on the nightly news. It’s completely intelligible to all native English speakers, but it’s a far cry from what you might hear in El Paso or South Boston, to say nothing of Belfast. Although virtually all English speakers can understand broadcast news, almost none of them actually speak like newscasters.
The same is true of the vast audience for Hindustani. So even if Hindustani interpreting allows you to communicate with your suppliers or other sources, that does not mean you’re communicating with them in the most familiar terms.
Speaking Hindustani to communicate concrete ideas to vendors or subcontractors might be sufficient, but if you’re trying to reach consumers or partners in India or Pakistan, you could be missing the mark. Just as your sales force would probably speak a differently flavored English in South Texas than in Northern Ireland, so too you might need to speak a different dialect to audiences in Jaipur than you do to those in Karachi.
Being understood is not the same thing as being effective. Speakers of all languages respond differently to what is most familiar and comfortable than to what is merely comprehensible.
For your company, the question of how to speak to your audience in India and Pakistan could be a question of localization: whether to tailor your speech to the distinct dialect of a specific region. Localization through telephone interpretation can help you to connect on a more basic level with a narrower audience than Hindustani alone can reach.
If you have questions about the appropriateness of your telephone interpretation for Hindustani speakers, ask your telephone interpretation provider about fluency in specific dialects. Ask about the many subtle but important features that distinguish different communities and how those come through in linguistic variety. Telephone interpretation is like all other business tools: it can be a hammer or a scalpel. How you use it makes all the difference.
