When IT workers and employers in the U.S. and the U.K. talk about offshore outsourcing, they might as well be speaking different languages. The employers say they’re cutting costs, but their employees hear that as cutting jobs.

One thing that’s saved employers and employees in continental Europe from similar misunderstandings is that they really do speak different languages — not so much from one another as from low-cost countries like India, which have so far picked up the bulk of U.S. offshore outsourcing contracts. English, the language that allows Indian companies to compete on equal terms with U.S. and U.K. ones for IT contracts in those countries, takes second place in the rest of Europe.

IT project proposals tend to be written in a company’s native language because they begin life as internal communications, according to Marian Hanganu, marketing manager of TotalSoft SA, a developer of ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems in Bucharest, Romania. So even if a German company considers its international working language to be English, it’s important for outsourcing suppliers to be able to communicate in German, he said.

Despite their programmers’ prowess, that’s a skill that Indian companies lack, Hanganu said.

“The important thing about Eastern Europeans, and particularly Romanians, compared to Indians, is that you can easily find people speaking French, German, Italian or Spanish,” he said.

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http://www.itworld.com/Man/2701/031224outsourcelanguage/