A o čem byl ten článek?

Článek je o sloučení tří banek z různých zemí(konkrétně skandinávských), no a teď to zaměstnanci,kteří pracovali ještě v těch nesloučených podnicích museli ze dne na den začít pracovat v angličtině(dříve pracovali ve svém vlastním jazyce- švédštině). No a teď se tam popisují různé problémy v komunikaci mezi těmi národy atd atd. Kdyby tě to zajímalo, tak to je celý článek. Já to musím překládat do školy.

Going Native
Globalizing companies are facing a great obstacle: communicating across cultures and languages. How do you get factory workers to understand what you need from them if you don´t speak their language? What language do you use in a business unit with multinational staff? And what language hurdles are there in a merger between firms from different countries?
I imagine waking up one day knowing that from now on you´ll have to work in a foreign language. That is what happened to staff from three banks representing four Nordic countries, when they merged in 2000 to form the bank Nordea, now based in Stockholm. Overnight, 20 per cent of the staff – mostly at the head office – had to speak and correspond in English. „What I realized was that I´d no longer be as fluent in my work as I used to be in my own language,“ says Torben Laustsen from Denmark. As Nordea´s head of group identity and communication, he was responsible for implementing the new company language.
Some of the staff had already gone through a cross-border merger. In 1997, the Swedish Nordbanken merged with the Finnish Merita to form Merita-Nordbanken. Swedish was made the official company language. Then, in March 2000, Merita-Nordbanken merged with the Danish financial firm Unidanmark. A few months later, the Norwegian Bank CBK joined the group. „Nordea was a merger of equals. By making English our company language, we were levelling the playing field,“ says Laustsen.
Nordea began an extensive process of integrating staff, using a newsletter and the company intranet to explain the merger. Planning and implementing language policies was an important part of the process. All official documents in English had to be translated into four languages for employees who did not speak English. Language courses were started.
One task that proved difficult was developing a databank of English translations for Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish banking and business terms. „We would agree on using an English term and then find out that everyone had a different idea of what it meant,“ says Laustsen, who explains that there were also cultural problems. When a Swede says: „I think we have a small problem“, all Swedes know he or she means a major catastrophe. But the others would say, „A small problem? So what?“
Anne-Marie Soderberg, a professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School, is a co-author of a book on the Nordea merger. „Many top managers told me that, although they were highly skilled, had an academic background, and spoke English, they had huge difficulties bringing critical issues up for discussion and resolving conflicts in English,“ she says.
The managers were afraid that in a confrontational situation their English wouldn´t be good enough to say things politely. „They were afraid of being too direct and making others lose face,“ says Soderberg. „So they avoided conflicts. But small conflicts, if not solved, grow into big conflicts.“
And there were problems. For example, the bank wanted to introduce best practice in as many areas as possible. „Everyone agreed with this, as long as it was their own bank´s best practice,“ says Laustsen. Also, while Merita-Nordbanken was the biggest bank in Finland, the other banks were the second largest in their countries. „So we had those who were used to thinking as market leaders, and those who were market followers.“
Today, Nordea is a model of integration, although Laustsen says the process was all „trial and error“. Would he do things differently today? „I would pay more attention to the linguistic and cultural nuances of communication.“
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JJ, dík

juuu, tak presne tenhle clanek taky zrovna louskam… docela s obtizema…