Businesses that do not have the right language skills to secure deals and negotiate with customers are losing millions of pounds in potential export deals, a report has found.
The UK as a whole loses around 3.5 per cent of its national income through wasted export potential – which in 2006 came to £48 million – due to the “gross costs of language ignorance”.
The study was carried out for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and UKTI by Professor Foreman-Peck of Cardiff Business School.
Exporters who do not invest in languages are crowding English-language markets where sales are constrained, the report found, and do not recognise the importance of language skills for selling into other markets where the scope for expansion is greater.
Non-European languages are likely to be least invested in, despite the growth potential in Chinese, Japanese and Russian markets.
In light of its results, the study recommended that potential exporters could be linked to UK Business Schools to help develop language skills alongside foreign business students, and said that UKTI is now exploring the idea.
'The likelihood is that there would be substantial net benefits from some form of foreign student placement scheme. There are many foreign (language) students in the UK, on business courses, who need to undertake projects that could be of interest to UK firms,” said Foreman-Peck.
Roy Allkin, co-founder of translation company Wolfestone told the Guardian that: “A lot of SMEs see languages as a cost and it’s absolutely not a cost, it’s an investment.
“We need to change the perceptions that the language barrier is too big to get over, that it’s too difficult to compete with native speakers and that ultimately, everyone out there speaks English – which is absolutely untrue.”
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