[Allan Carr]

Some years ago, the company I was working for were planning to set up a multi-national call centre in the UK, where as we all know, we are the world's worst at foreign languages. The project manager, who spoke no other languages and had never spent any real time outside of the UK was working out how many different languages he would need to cover. His views:-

German - that would cover Germany, half of Switzerland and Austria. He had never heard of 'Shweizerdeutsch'. Our manager in Germany ended up speaking English with a Swiss guy at Zurich airport because neither could understand each others 'German'. I can always tell the difference between a German and an Austrian when they are speaking English, let alone German which tells you something about the accent.

Scandinavian (FFS what language is Scandinavian?) - this would cover Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland! Finland isn't even Scandinavia for heaven's sake. If you have even seen Finnish you realise that in the old days, the typewriter repair man would need an awful lot of 'i's. The nearest language to Finnish is Hungarian, it is not even a Romanic structure so you can't do word for word translation. As for Swedes and Danes speaking the same language, don't ever say that in Copenhagen.

Yes, a lot of call centres are set up with lttle consideration of what the customers actually want.