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 [转帖]谈判桌上的语言学问题 |
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作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
作者：英国《金融时报》汤姆•米切尔(Tom Mitchell) 2009-01-16
说汉语的詹纯新和说意大利语的毛里齐奥•费拉里(Maurizio Ferrari)发现，或许英语已经日益成为国际商务中的通用语言，但其中某些变幻莫测的特点也会造成语义混淆。
詹纯新是中联重科(Zoomlion)的董事长兼首席执行官。由这家建筑设备制造商牵头，联合髙盛(Goldman Sachs)、中意合作曼达林基金(Mandarin Capital Partners)以及中国私人股本公司弘毅投资(Hony Capital)等合作伙伴组成的财团，以2.71亿欧元收购了意大利机械制造商Cifa (Compagnia Italiana Forme Acciaio)。交易在去年9月完成，是规模第二大的中国企业欧洲收购案，并使中联重科成为全球最大的混凝土机械制造商。
现在，詹纯新与Cifa首席执行官费拉里的工作往来十分密切。由于这两个人不会说同一种语言时，这就成了件不容易的事。
在所有跨境合并中，语言都可能成为问题。中国企业知道，对外国人来说，汉语是多么地令人望而生畏，因此越来越多的企业开始聘用有海外学习经历的高级管理人员，以便为外国合作伙伴提供方便。
然而，中联重科与Cifa选择了一种更加与众不同的方式。它们没有选择中文和意大利语之间的互译，而是把英语作为消除语言差异的桥梁。费拉里说英语有些困难，詹纯新则完全不会说英语。
詹纯新在位于湖南省会长沙的中联重科总部工作，而费拉里在米兰附近的塞纳哥工作。他们之间大多通过电子邮件联系。因此，詹纯新的翻译以及亲自撰写英文电子邮件的费拉里本人都能有多一点的时间来构思措辞。
但面对面的会谈就没有那么从容了，比如去年9月的一次会议上就出现了有关“delocalisation”一词的问题。
会议的议题是Cifa是否可以将公司的部分职能迁到俄罗斯去。从意大利方面看来，费拉里的理解是把工作转移到米兰以外的地方去，因此把这个过程称为“delocalisation”（意为从本地离开）。
在中国，外国投资者将类似的过程——用中国员工取代成本高昂的外籍员工，以便节约成本——称作“localisation”（本地化）。于是，中联重科的高管们感到纳闷，这个“delocalisation”是什么意思呢？前缀“de”似乎意味着它是本地化的对立面，双方花了好一会儿才明白他们说的其实是一回事儿。
“我们在这个词上浪费了30分钟，”费拉里表示。
不过，两家公司的不同之处不只是语言。在深圳证交所上市的中联重科是一家国有企业，1992年创建，前身为长沙高新技术开发区中联建设机械产业公司。公司的英文名称是一个语言上的偶然事件。“一位英语很好的同事选了（Zoomlion）这个名字，”詹纯新说道。“这听上去和我们的中文名字（中联）很像。他还说这个词的意思是怒吼的雄狮，但显然这并不完全正确。”
中联重科旗下有12家分公司，业务规模庞大。该公司本身就是中国经济崛起和未来潜力的生动说明。
中联重科在长沙的一家工厂非常之大，以至于可能会被当成飞机制造厂。工厂内停放着一排排重型卡车和建筑设备，就像孩子的梦境一般。
“中联重科（和Cifa）完全不同，”费拉里表示。“我们没有那么大的产品规模——他们甚至生产消防车……我们有1000名员工而他们有1.5万人。意大利和中国的劳动力成本不同。”
相比之下，Cifa是一个受人尊敬的意大利品牌。由卡洛•奥森达(Carlo Ausenda)在1928年创立。Cifa专注于生产高端混凝土搅拌车与混凝土泵车，但近来迷失了发展方向。“Cifa的问题在于它为若干家族所有，”费拉里表示。“有时候，家族对局势的应对更多地是出于喜好而不是依据头脑。”
意大利私人股本基金Magenta和其它投资者在2006年收购了Cifa 72.5%的股份，其余部分为家族所有者共有。随后，Magenta将这家有着80年历史的公司卖给了只有16岁的中联重科——充分展示了亚洲企业的扩张速度。
尽管两家公司如此不同，詹纯新和费拉里都坚定认为，他们有着同样的商业理念，而这些理念能够帮助他们构筑跨越语言鸿沟的桥梁。
“中联与Cifa是一家人，”詹纯新解释道。
“詹纯新是个好人，有着同样的思考方式。我们的文化非常相似，”费拉里表示。“企业的核心是在公司工作的人……他们是真正为公司创造价值的人。”
目前，两家公司将继续把英语当作共同语言，但费拉里承认，不能永远这样继续下去。他表示Cifa正在意大利的大学里搜罗说中文的学生：“我们必须融入中国——我们也必须融入意大利——借助说着相同语言的人。”
译者/管婧
English may increasingly be the lingua franca of international business, but some of its vagaries can cause confusion, as Mandarin speaker Zhan Chunxin and Italian speaker Maurizio Ferrari have discovered.
Mr Zhan is chairman and chief executive of Zoomlion, a construction equipment maker that led a €271m deal for Italian machinery maker Compagnia Italiana Forme Acciaio (Cifa) along with with consortium partners Goldman Sachs, Sino-Italian fund Mandarin Capital Partners and Hony Capital, a Chinese private equity firm. Completed in September, the transaction ranks as China Inc's second largest European buy-out and made Zoomlion the world's biggest manufacturer of concrete machinery.
Mr Zhan now works closely with Mr Ferrari, his counterpart at Cifa. That is no easy task when the two men do not share a common language.
Language can be an issue in all cross-border mergers. Chinese companies, knowing how daunting Mandarin can seem to foreigners, increasingly hire senior executives who have studied abroad in order to accommodate their overseas partners.
However, Zoomlion and Cifa have taken a more unusual path. Rather than translating between Chinese and Italian, they bridge their linguistic divide using English, which Mr Ferrari speaks with some difficulty and Mr Zhan not at all.
With Mr Zhan ba<x>sed at Zoomlion's corporate headquarters in Changsha, capital of central Hunan province, and Mr Ferrari in Senago, near Milan, much of their interaction is through e-mail. This gives Mr Zhan's translators and Mr Ferrari, who taps out his own English-language e-mails, a bit of extra time to craft their messages.
Face-to-face meetings are less forgiving, such as one last September when the issue of “delocalisation” was raised.
At issue was whether Cifa might move some functions to Russia. From his Italian vantage point, Mr Ferrari conceived of this as moving work away from Milan and therefore described the process as “delocalisation”.
In China, foreign investors describe a similar process – replacing expensive expatriate staff with Chinese employees in order to save costs – as “localisation”. What, Zoomlion executives wondered, was this “delocalisation”? The prefix “de” seemed to imply it was the opposite of localisation, and it took the two parties some time to figure out that they were talking about the same thing.
“We have lost 30 minutes regarding one word,” says Mr Ferrari.
More than language separates the two companies. State-owned Zoomlion, which is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, began life in 1992 as the Changsha Hi-Tech Development Area Zoomlion Construction Mechanical Industry Company. Its English moniker was a linguistic accident. “A colleague who is good at English picked the name [Zoomlion],” Mr Zhan says. “It sounded similar to our Chinese name [Zhonglian]. He also said it means ‘a roaring lion', although apparently that's not exactly true.”
Zoomlion encompasses a dozen branch companies, and the scale of its operations is huge. The company dramatically illustrates China's economic rise and future potential.
One of Zoomlion's plants, in Changsha, is so big it could be taken for an aircraft manufacturing facility. Inside is a child's dreamland of heavy-duty trucks and construction equipment parked in rows.
“Zoomlion is completely different [from Cifa],” Mr Ferrari observes. “We don't have the same scale of products – they even produce fire trucks . . . We are 1,000 [employees] and they are 15,000. The cost of workers is different in Italy and China.”
By contrast, Cifa is a venerable Italian brand established by Carlo Ausenda in 1928. Cifa focuses on high-end concrete mixers and pumps, but lost its way more recently. “The problem with Cifa was that it was owned by groups of families,” Mr Ferrari says. “Sometimes, [families] answer to the situation more with the stomach than the brain.”
In 2006 Magenta, an Italian private equity fund, and other investors took a 72.5 per cent stake in Cifa, with the family owners sharing the rest. Magenta's subsequent sale of the 80-year-old business to the 16-year-old Zoomlion says much about the pace of Asia's expansion.
In spite of the companies' differences, Mr Zhan and Mr Ferrari insist they have similar business philosophies and that these help bridge the linguistic divide.
“Zoomlion and Cifa are a family,” Mr Zhan explains.
“Mr Zhan is a good man who thinks the same way. Our cultures are very similar,” says Mr Ferrari. “The centre of the business is the people who work in the company . . . [They] are really the machines who create value for the company.”
For now the two companies will continue to use English as their common language but Mr Ferrari acknowledges that this cannot continue forever. Cifa, he says, is scouring Italian universities for Chinese- language students: “We must integrate in China – and we must integrate in Italy – [with] people who have the same language.”
作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
上一次由tahiti于2009-1-18 周日, 10:03修改，总共修改了1次
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 [转帖]谈判桌上的语言学问题 -- tahiti - (7010 Byte) 2009-1-18 周日, 09:44 (1977 reads)
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