A company preparing for China often solves language and assumes it has solved communication. It has not. An excellent interpreter renders what was said, faithfully and neutrally, which is exactly their professional duty. What they will not do — because it is not their job — is tell you that the answer you just received was a polite refusal, or that the question you asked cannot be answered in front of that particular colleague.
Three distinct roles
- The interpreter. Renders speech accurately in real time. Essential for a formal meeting, a negotiation with legal content, or any room where precision matters more than nuance. Hire a professional; a bilingual employee pressed into the role does both jobs badly.
- The technical translator. Renders documents — specifications, contracts, manuals — where a wrong word is a wrong part. A general translator and a technical one are not interchangeable.
- The bilingual manager. Understands both the business and both cultures, and their value is judgement rather than fluency: knowing which question to ask, when to ask it, whom to ask, and what an answer actually meant.
Why the third one is hard to replace
Because most of what goes wrong between a French company and a Chinese one is not a translation error. It is a correctly translated sentence that meant something different from what it appeared to mean. Only someone who holds both the commercial context and both cultural readings catches that — and catching it once, early, is usually worth more than the whole year's language budget.
If you can only have one
For a first negotiation, hire the interpreter — precision on the terms is what you cannot afford to lose. For an ongoing relationship, the judgement role is the one that compounds. And for a technical visit, someone who understands the product beats someone who only understands the language, every time.
One arrangement to avoid: letting the other side's employee interpret for both parties. They are competent and they are not neutral, and neither of you should be put in that position.