Comment by muzani

Funny enough, back when I worked with a Southeast Asian team, we all spoke English. Native languages were Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Mandarin, Ukrainian and so on. But most people wouldn't be able to speak these languages, so we mostly used English.

The customer was often Indonesian and would write bug reports in the language. The non-Indo speakers would just run them through Google translate and comment what they understood and those who were native speakers would correct them if they were mistaken. Especially when there's sarcasm or some cultural context.

There were a few who only spoke the Chinese dialects, and we'd use an intermediary in meetings, and AI/Google translate on text and code. This was also a good use of AI - it was fluent in whatever language, Java or Mandarin and could piece them together well.

Anyway, yeah, it's workable. Nobody knows all the languages. In engineering, there's more empathy for this, especially from the multilinguals.