6 Verbal Communication Tips For International Audiences
International audiences present unique challenges to great communication. The rules that apply to the home audience may not be suitable for a culturally diverse one.
Poor communication can result in loss of business and hard feelings among your audience, so here are 6 essential tips to help with your verbal communications:
1. Understand your audience
- Familiarise yourself with your audience
- Understand their culture, language, social norms and business protocol
- Mold communications around your audience and help avoid cultural misunderstandings
- Arrange interpreters and translators upfront if the audience is not familiar with the language you generally use for communication
- Keep your messages short and concise
- Make your speech as clear as possible and repeat important details
- Avoid complex words, phrases and jargon
- Ask if the audience has any questions or comments about the topic under discussion
- Encourage the audience to ask for clarification whenever ambiguity rises
- Keep an eye out for language nuances
- Direct and forceful language can be considered rude in some cultures whereas indirect and vague speech is considered ‘suspicious’ in others
- Humour is tricky – your witty remark might mean nothing or even worse, something entirely different in another language
- Topics considered humorous by one set of people might be offensive to another
