Social Media Monitoring that speaks your language Talkwalker

A growing team that speaks many languages

Talkwalker’s team currently consists of 29 people of 15 different nationalities that speak a total of 19 different languages. That’s an average of 4 languages per person (or 3,8 to be more precise). Talkwalker is growing rapidly and welcomes about 2 new employees every month.

The most multilingual team members:

Anna: 5 languages (German, Mandarin, English, Polish, Spanish) David: 6 languages (Russian, Luxembourgish, English, French, Dutch, German) Naïm: 5 languages (French, English, Luxembourgish, German, Persian) Stephan: 5 languages (German, Mandarin, English, Russian, French) Jerry: 6 languages (English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Danish) Thomas: 5 languages (French, Dutch, English, Luxembourgish, German) Julie: 6 languages (French, Dutch, English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek) Robert: 5 languages (Luxembourgish, German, English, French, Spanish)

The importance of diversity in the workplace

As nicely summarized in Rick Suttle’s article on workplace diversity benefits, companies that look beyond cultural, linguistic and religious criteria in their recruitment are able to select more talented candidates with a higher level of education and with more valuable work experience.

This chosen approach is exactly what has enabled Talkwalker to grow a team that is extremely diverse, benefiting the company in multiple ways. Cultural diversity in the sales team for example allows for a better understanding of clients’ needs and communications that are adapted to their language and culture. In the IT team diversity plays a major role in innovation and problem resolution thanks to the personal logic that each individual uses and that is built from their own references. In the communications team, multilingual community management allows for a “glocalized” approach that includes cultural understanding.

What internationality brings to the client

What does this mean for our clients?

It’s quite simple: whether you speak French, English, German, Serbian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Luxembourgish, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, Bosnian, Croatian, Russian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek or Persian, or anything else, contact us about your social media monitoring and analytics needs and we will provide you with an easy to use and incredibly powerful tool that covers your language.

 Hyperpolyglots around the world

Talking about all of these languages brings to mind the case of hyperpolyglots, those people who speak an incredible amount of languages. You may have heard of Timothy Doner, a 16 year old American who demonstrated his fluency in 20 languages in a video posted on YouTube. Other famous examples include Ken Hale, an MIT linguist, who spoke an astounding 50 languages and Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti who spoke 72 languages, 39 of which he mastered with complete fluency.

Although as a team we are not quite hyperpolyglots, the Talkwalker SMM tool definitely is, with the ability to process the content you want to search for on the social web in 187 languages from 247 different countries. We differentiate dialects from national languages and also depending on their country of origin. For example we can distinguish Catalan from Castilian, Javanese from Indonesian, Portuguese from Portugal versus from Brazil and traditional Chinese from simplified Chinese.

We also speak PHP, C#, Ajax, JavaScript, Perl, C, Ruby, Java, Python, VB.NET, C++, Haskell, Clojure, CoffeeScript, Lisp, Lua... but rest assured, these are not counted in the 19 languages spoken at Talkwalker.

On a daily basis it is completely normal for us to switch from one language to another when speaking to each other: “Moien! Ça va, alles gut?  Have a nice day today!” How about you? How many languages do you speak?

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