How to Make Global Employee Communications Comply with Overseas Translation Mandates

The question of whether a multinational must translate employee communications overseas traditionally was not asked very often. Decades ago, multinationals ran their international operations as siloed units. Headquarters exercised little day-to-day oversight over foreign personnel matters and transmitted few if any messages or documents directly to overseas rank-and-file workers. In that era, a multinational’s work orders to local laborers at a plant in, say, Montreal came from onsite Quebecois personnel administrators—in French.