As a member of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), my job entails operating in more than 190 countries in total to safeguard the children´s rights and get to the most underprivileged youngsters; therefore, I tend to deal with people from different parts of the world with different cultures and usually have difficulty communicating with some people because of the difference in language. The language barrier is an example of one of the problems that I experience during communication at my workplace. I have consistently sent numerous emails, sent some of my staff to address this issue at the main offices and made calls to the office of the UNICEF’s Executive Director on the language barrier issue while still trying to schedule an appointment with the director´s team to address this issue.
The best course of action to take to take to solve the language barrier is having a diverse working group of people who speak different languages to help combat this issue of a language barrier since by having a diverse workforce, whenever you have a client who you don’t understand what they are saying you can quickly call upon a worker that hails from the same place or someone who understands the language in question to help with the translation. As for those individuals for who it isn’t easy to understand their language, we encourage them to look for colleagues who understand English to help them translate what they are saying and through that, we will be able to communicate with them effectively. Included in the emails that we have sent to the Executive’s office are attached recordings of the conversations that we have had trouble communicating with the client and an outline of how we plan to encourage our clients to look for English-literate persons to help them in communicating.