The challenges due to different languages can be summarized to: • Some documents received by IMO are in Norwegian.
• Implementing graphical user interface (GUI) elements, which are in Norwegian, is more difficult.
• Customer hesitates to use English, at least orally. Documents in Norwegian
IMO was involved in the Desert projects in 2004, while NMO has been working with these projects many years before that. Therefore many of the documents were initially written in Norwegian because both customer and the service provider where Norwegians. After the offshoring of maintenance tasks to India, these Norwegian documents had to be translated to English so the Indian resources could read them. Over time, many documents have been translated, many new documents have been written in English, but still some documents, from both NMO (i.e. requirements specification) and customer (i.e. technical specification), are in Norwegian. This introduces unnecessary translation work.
IMO use both freely available Internet tools such as TriTrans16 for translating from Norwegian to English. Documents translated by automatic Internet services can be used, but the quality is not good. In ProjS they have now also
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hired an external company to do some of the translation work. Using external translators is of course costly compared to having the documents in English from the beginning, and such translation can have a deep impact on the implementation if the translation is not accurate. The documents often have domain specific words, and also much technical words related to IT, thus when translating them, especially by conventional translators, accuracy may be lost. When the translators totally lacks tacit knowledge related to the domain, interpreting the information is not easy, thus making it hard to express it with all its details in another language. None of the informants commented on the quality of the use of external translators though.
Informal talk with two employees at Mitos Norway, one of them being my supervisor, revealed that different groups of employees at NCom have different comfort level in oral English. Mitos has projects with NCom where the major part of the resources from NCom is relatively young people, and in these projects English is easy to use as the common project language for both written and oral communication. In other cases, such as the Desert projects in this case study, the NCom resources are often older people with high technical expertise. These people are more reluctant to use English as they have been using Norwegian as their professional language for decades.
Difficulties for Indians to implement GUI in Norwegian
In ProjO the IMO team some times has to deal with implementing graphical user interface (GUI), which is in Norwegian. In such cases, where they do not understand the Norwegian words, and they have little functional and domain knowledge, the implementation work is not easy. Team lead (and developer) for ProjO at IMO describes it this way:
All screenshots we get is in Norwegian because it shall be in Norwegian in the final product, but we do not understand much of it. We need translation to be able to understand what the different GUI elements mean. We use tools such as TriTrans to translate, and this is hard, because some times we misunderstand due to insufficient quality in the translation and lacking functional knowledge. (Ano6, Appendix
B.5)
For aiding in both understanding GUI-elements, and also understanding some typical domain specific words in Norwegian, the onsite team has developed a custom dictionary for NCom. Typical domain specific Norwegian words such as konto (account) and kunde (customer) are explained in this dictionary. Nowadays some offshore resources actually use these Norwegian terms even when communicating in English internally at IMO. This is maybe done due to practicality, but such shared use of terms can cause a better team feeling across countries. Communities-of-practice has a shared mental model, a world
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view, and often have a great connection internally, a good team spirit. I do not argue that use of these Norwegian terms builds communities-of-practice, of course not, but such use of terms specific for one work area is often salient in such groups. Through an ethnographic study of restaurant workers, how they played and worked at the same time at the workplace, Fine (1988) shows how
idioculture gives a feeling of belonging and security from the outside world.
Idioculture is a term that is somewhat similar to communities-of-practice, it is a group of people with a shared mental model, and similar believes, behaviour, custom and rites(Fine, 1988). During my case study I did not find any such idiocultures across IMO and NMO, but I argue that use of Norwegian terms gives a better feeling of closeness to each other, thus better feeling of belonging.
Hesitation to use English
In ProjD, where IMO and customer communicate directly, the communication is mostly on written English because the client does not feel comfortable with oral English. This works well because similarly some, but not all, IMO resources prefer written communication rather than oral due to shyness or having a reserved personality. On the other hand oral communication is wanted sometimes because it is faster and you can clear up misunderstandings right away.
When the Indian resources are in Norway for knowledge transfer sessions or other reasons, they want to visit the customer to see how they work and interact with them directly. Some of the Indian informants who have been in Norway reported that some times they have not been able to have face-to-face interaction with the customer even if they were situated near each other in Oslo. The reason has been that the customer did not desire to meet IMO resources. The informants believed it was because many NCom employees did not feel comfortable using English orally. From their case study on another GSD-project, Herbsleb & Grinter 1999b, also found that non-native English speakers (German employees in this case) hesitated to speak English, and they were more comfortable using only written English.
In ProjS there are examples of meetings held in Norway between NMO and customer, where IMO resources took part through teleconference. The customer did not want to switch to English after request from both Mitos’ offshore and onsite resources. Even though NMO tried to get customer to use English, so offshore resources could understand what is happening, the customer refused because of lack of comfort in using English.
In chapter 5.4.1 about challenges due to the chosen communication model, I discussed that when IMO is left out in the problem solving or requirements
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gathering phase, it will be more difficult for them to internalize the information due to low level of shared tacit knowledge. Thus, IMO should take part in these phases along with NMO. The example above about customer preferring Norwegian, and difficulties getting the NCom resources to use English on meetings with IMO, reveals a great barrier to include IMO in the problem solution design and requirements gathering because of the natural high degree of customer interaction required by these activities. Such challenges will maybe have less impact over time when the customer gets more hands-on experience with working with global actors.