Listening to customers, creating marketing materials, or writing strategies – much of your professional life revolves around communication. Effective language usage is one of the keys to international business success.
Language audits allow your organization to gain insight into employees’ linguistic profiles in foreign languages, thus creating a more efficient language training process and recruitment tool.
What is a language audit?
Language audits provide an independent evaluation of an individual’s current foreign language skills, whether they be employed, contractors or job candidates. Panorama offers customized audits designed to meet the unique requirements of our clients – be they part of the recruitment process or supporting other functions in support of business activities. Our language tests are performed by trained and experienced professionals and adhere to standards set out by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
An extensive language audit will assess a candidate’s level of language competence across four aspects: speaking, reading, listening comprehension and writing. This enables us to accurately define their language proficiency profile against what’s needed for their position – making language training much more efficient.
Communication is of critical importance in any business, from customer relations to internal operations. This is particularly true of companies working with foreign customers or suppliers; their employees’ linguistic competency plays a key role in its success. A thorough language audit will identify any areas for improvements as well as provide a roadmap for further development of your company.
Our Full Language Audit service, the most extensive we offer, will assess candidates’ knowledge in grammar and vocabulary usage as well as reading/writing comprehension as well as pronunciation skills. We then use this data to provide an accurate description of their current language proficiency levels, which can then be compared with CEFR classification and Global Scale of English (GSE), to allow us to assess any previous or ongoing language training efforts and their success. Language audits performed remotely save clients both time and resources; results are available immediately for review by auditees if desired; we also organize international professional language exams with internationally recognised certificates awarded as results of auditing services.
Why is a language audit so important?
Language is one of the key aspects of business communication. A company’s communication can either aide or hinder its performance, so it’s critical that its language be suitable for its task at hand; conducting a language audit may prove to be invaluable in this process.
An audit can help a business understand their current communication strengths and weaknesses, helping to identify any areas where employees may require training to enhance their communication abilities. A language audit may also assist the company with understanding where training needs may exist for staff in order to enhance performance overall.
Language audits can also be beneficial in recruiting. A recruiter will frequently ask applicants to complete a language test in order to assess their level of proficiency in a required language – this may range from simple binary testing (yes/no) up to more comprehensive assessments using international scales such as CEFR.
But it is essential to keep in mind that any language audit can only be as accurate as the data being fed into it, so when conducting one it is vital that multiple sources of data be available; native and non-native speakers alike will help ensure accurate results of the language audit.
Language audits can also serve to inform the creation of new policies and guidelines surrounding language use in certain contexts, while helping identify and mitigate any associated risks with language technology use. However, their design remains relatively novel with numerous challenges yet to be met.
Example: it may not always be possible to identify and mitigate all potential risks at a technology level, particularly when normative values such as truthfulness or fairness clash and require tradeoffs [90]. Deliberating and measuring toxicology when applying machine learning models to real world data presents its own set of challenges; harms vary according to culture, society and politics groups.
How can a language audit help my business?
An effective language audit is an ideal way to evaluate the success of your language training programs. An audit enables you to pinpoint a learning strategy tailored specifically for each employee’s individual needs while measuring how effectively employees utilize their newly gained language skills in the workplace – providing assurance that training has had a positive effect on your business.
Language audits can assist your company in crafting texts and content that more successfully attract and engage customers. Word choice, tone of voice and sentence structure all have the ability to significantly alter meaning for customers and have an effect on perception of brand. An experienced multilingual copywriter can identify such inconsistencies and offer suggestions for improvement.
Language audit results can also aid recruitment processes. For instance, hiring managers might use them to quickly verify the foreign language level of potential candidates – an efficient and quick method is through language audit tests, designed to quickly check grammar structures, vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension skills and writing ability against CEFR classification levels.
Language audits can be an invaluable asset to businesses of any size and industry, no matter the sector. A language audit can assess the quality of communication with clients and assist with recruiting bilingual staff; increase marketing effectiveness; enhance website content optimization for search engines and social media; or help evaluate marketing efforts overall.
Attracting an international web audience has become an essential business practice, yet to get the most out of this experience, companies must ensure their content reaches the appropriate audiences – conducting an accurate language audit will assist with this goal!
What are the advantages of a language audit?
Communication is at the core of international business; it gives your company its identity, sets you apart from competitors and allows you to have an impactful presence in society.
If the communication within your company is less clear and effective than it could be, a language audit can provide valuable insight. A language audit is a professional verification of knowledge of a foreign language which evaluates different language skills such as grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing against CEFR levels. All audits available through Focus platform have been prepared and verified by expert linguists so as to guarantee quality audits.
Language audit results provide valuable insight into the linguistic abilities of employees, job candidates and contractors. Furthermore, their findings can help identify training needs among your staff as well as create a targeted language program.
An audit can also help you assess the success of your language training program. By assessing learners’ proficiency levels and tracking how language learning affects work performance, a language audit will ensure your program offers maximum return on investment for your organization.
Language audits offer several key advantages, chief among them objective and reliable measurements of your staff’s ability to communicate in foreign languages. Furthermore, language audits can assess the success of training programs while pinpointing areas requiring improvement.
Your company’s communication style is key to its business, which is why it is crucial that its language policies be regularly reviewed and revised in order to ensure team members possessing all of the language skills required to perform effectively in their jobs.
Focus’ platform makes language audits quick and simple to conduct, making them a useful tool for businesses that prioritize reliability and efficiency. There is a selection of pre-configured audits as well as support from an auditor dedicated to tailoring audits specifically to your company’s needs.
