"Strategic reflections on transversal actions": the art of anglification

If part of your unofficial role is, like mine, to be one of a handful of “Anglo-Saxons” working in a large French company, you will almost certainly at some point hear the infamous words: “could you just take a look at the English in this email / presentation / report”.

If the person who asks you this is fairly senior, it’s usually wise to accept with a smile and get on with it. If they’re very senior indeed, the challenge is obviously to change as much as is necessary and that you can reasonably get away with without making them look like an idiot. (This is a delicate balancing act: if things get really desperate, my trick is to only put half your rewrite in tracked changes to minimize embarrassment when he opens your email).

Assuming you do have some latitude with the red pen, I’ve found that the whole thing goes quicker if you stop trying to work out what they’re trying to say in English and just imagine you’re French.  Someone has found a “good point of departure for a reflection”? They’re unlikely to be balancing mirrors on airport runways – the French will be something along the lines of “bon point de départ pour engager une reflection” In English, “a starting point for a discussion”.

So having got the idea – think French to improve the English- you can get out your berets and tricolore flags and keep a look out for the following clangers:

· Animate. The French animate meetings, websites, teams… and when they go on holiday, they expect animations in the evening. Anglo-Saxons on the other hand are remarkably inanimate. No single word exists – you might be ”leading” a team or a meeting, or “producing content” for a website. If you are unfortunate enough to find yourself in the middle of a French colonie de vacances in the middle of August you will look forward to the evening “entertainment”. Look at the context and find something that makes reasonable sense.

· Reference. As in,” X is a reference in the construction industry”. “Une reference” is used a lot in this context in French and sometimes just about goes in English… but only just. Try using adjectives like “major” or “leading” followed by the type of thing the company does e.g. “X is a leading construction company…”

· Transversal. The word that makes me really want to run for the hills. Transversal programmes, transversal themes… Very easy. They are “cross-“ something. Cross-business, cross-sector… In fact this one is so easy that if you change it often enough, some people may even catch on and start using it themselves.

· Actions. Very rarely actions, particularly if they happen after a reflection, or form part of a transversal programme. Almost always “initiatives”.

· Accompany. Don’t approach this one after a long day. “Accompagner le développement”, “accompagner ses clients” invariably show up in literal translation. There is no word, but the concept is not a bad one, so don’t roll your eyes and strike out the whole sentence. “Facilitate” can sometimes work for abstract concepts like development, growth etc. “Support” or “work with” can be used when talking about stakeholders. Sometimes it might be better to go one step back and work out what they’re really trying to say. “Supporting our client’s expansion / growth” for example, works better than just “supporting our clients”.

The thing about this list is it could go on for pages. In fact I’d love to know if other people have their own bêtes noires (not black beasts, please note!) to add to the list. Otherwise happy rewriting and just remember the golden rule – if someone tells you the document they’ve asked you to read has already been sent to several hundred senior managers, the response is always, “It looked pretty much fine to me”.

The Rapport d'activités: getting your thoughts (and post-it notes) in order

Annual report planning time has come around again and the same issues you confronted last year are rearing their ugly heads once more.

There are of course the standard internal politics issues: how many pages you can squeeze in front of the Chairman’s statement before he gets offended; how much money you should put aside for photoshopping Board members’ double chins and paunches.

But the main question is always: how do you get across all the information you have in a way that tells a good story, doesn’t leave the reader drowning in detail but is sufficiently meaty to be worth the effort of reading?

A country not renowned for its love of simplification, France has adopted a straightforward approach. All the detail – performance by sector, corporate governance, management report, shareholder information – and accounts go into a doorstopper volume called the Document de reference. A second (non-regulatory) tome, the Rapport d’activités is a much sexier affair that gives an overview of the business and how it’s performed over the year.

This makes life easier for corporate communicators than trying to cram everything into a single Annual Report.  But the freedom to pick what goes into the Rapport d’activités can result in muddled messaging. There are five things worth bearing in mind here:

1)    Consider your audience. The Rapport d’activités often serves as much as a corporate brochure for potential employees, clients and partners as it does for investors. Furthermore, there are several sub-classes of investors- institutional vs. retail, long-standing investors vs potential new investors… Think who you are writing for (and who you’re not writing for), what content they expect to find and how much they are already likely to know about the company.

2)    Keep it simple. Because the range of audiences is so broad, and the level of knowledge readers bring to the document so uneven, you need to focus on keeping the story simple. That doesn’t mean skipping over complicated parts of the business: it means presenting facts and statements as simply as possible, and in an order that makes sense.

3)    Work out what story you want to tell. The report should include your “core” story – what the business is about, who it helps and how it makes money – and your “annual story”. Was it a year of change or consolidation? How did the markets you operate in impact the business’ activities over the year? What does the future hold? Total manages this balance between core story and annual story well.

4)    Structure is paramount. What sections do you want to include and in which order? Beyond the standard sections – chairman’s statement, performance, business overview etc. – your audience needs will dictate the inclusion of additional sections. Investors increasingly expect to see a prominent Strategy section, for example, and clients will understand your business better if you can include case studies and explanations of your approach. In order to create a flat plan for the document (or sitemap in the case of an online report), I find it helpful to use Post-it notes. Writing the name of each section on a Post-it and moving each section around until you’re happy with the result is a good way to get your thoughts in order. You can then repeat the exercise with content items – overall performance figures, performance figures by business, KPIs, client case studies. The aim is to ensure that everything you want to say finds a home, is not repeated, and is not introduced to the reader without the appropriate context. Even better iff you can find ways to link sections (e.g. by referencing case studies in the strategy section – Capita does a good job of this).

5)    Aim to write where possible in the target language. If the majority of your readers speak English as their first or second language, use English and translate into French. Then invest as much time and care as possible in ensuring the translated version reads like an original. (Try giving the translated document to a native speaker who has not seen the original-language version). Of course for organizational reasons, this may not be possible, particularly if the people who sign off on each section have a poor grasp of the language.

This is of course an oversimplification – your “core” story, for example, needs some thinking about and is likely to involve the input of a large number of people. But the exercise should at least get you to the point where you can brief a design agency… and start preparing the Chairman for the fact he won’t be appearing on page 1.