New languages - new frontiers

I was in a client partner meeting yesterday and he griped about how the European market is so rich and inviting and we could not do great business just because we dont enough expertise in the top 3 languages - German/French and Italian.

Europe is not america and we understand that its a different ball game altogether. For us, the user experience and usability engineers communicating with the end users matter a lot. Even the business users in Swiss or Germany prefer talking to them in their language. A year back when I was in a call with Johnson and Johnson - Germany how the users found it difficult to express their thoughts in English!

So what can we do as a company? - Thru the Academy, lets initiate the process of motivating employees to learn new languages to win new frontiers - Europe and East Asia - Tie up with external sources to provide a world class language course in German, French, Japanese, and Chinese/mandarin - Like CCP a new language certification internally could also help employees a lot to build their career as well as learn a new language

Any thoughts?

Adieu!