·By Linran YU
At Some Point, Stop Interpreting
A rehearsed introduction should be said by one person, not relayed by two.
I came to La Preferred as an interpreter. At the start the work was narrow: introducing the product, with the same questions arriving in much the same order.
After a few rounds of it I knew the product as well as anyone in the room. So I stopped interpreting it. When a customer asked what made it different, I answered. In English, directly, without turning to anyone first.
I asked first. Before I answered anything on my own, the owner and I settled which questions were mine and which had to come back to him.
It was faster, it sounded like a person rather than a translation, and people warmed to it.
Why relaying a pitch is the wrong tool
An interpreter is for content that is being made in the room. An offer, a condition, a decision, a question nobody anticipated.
A product introduction is not made in the room. It already exists, and everybody involved knows it. Relaying known material takes twice as long and loses most of its warmth on the way through.
There is also the rhythm. A customer asks one question, gets an answer in a second language, then hears it again and has to wait for the end before reacting. Interest does not survive that very well.
What direct speech made possible
Three things that relaying cannot do.
Answering in the order the customer cares about. A shop owner who opens with shelf life does not want the paragraph about the factory first. When I am speaking rather than relaying, I can start where they started.
Reading the face and adjusting. If the specification is landing badly, I drop it and talk about returns. A relay has to deliver what was said, not what would work.
Following up at once. The best question is usually the third one, and it only arrives if the first two answers came back quickly.
Where I hand it straight back
This only works inside clear limits, and the limits matter more than the fluency.
Anything being decided goes back to the principal. Price, discount, exclusivity, lead time, anything that commits the company. A sentence that binds a business belongs to that business, and I will interpret it rather than say it.
Anything I do not know goes back too. There is a strong temptation, once you are fluent in a product, to improvise the answer to a technical question. That is how a brand ends up with a claim nobody can support.
And when the conversation turns into a negotiation, I return to the channel and let the two parties speak to each other. Where people look in that situation is its own problem.
What it takes to get there
Learning the product properly. Not the brochure: the specification, the objections, the three questions every customer asks, and the honest answer to the fourth one that nobody in marketing likes.
And the conversation I had at the start: what I may say on my own, and what I must pass along. Ten minutes, once, and it prevents the only kind of mistake that actually matters here.
The bottom line
An interpreter is worth having for the conversations nobody can rehearse. The question out of nowhere. The terms. The moment something has to be decided.
For everything that gets said again and again, there is a simpler answer. One person learns the product well enough to say it themselves, in the customer’s language, and the sentence reaches the customer first-hand.
That is what changed with this client. I started out carrying other people’s words across the table. I ended up talking to the customer myself, and the conversations improved the moment there was one voice in the room instead of two.