Two Jobs, One Hire

In Zürich in 2021, On’s content team expanded from seven people to more than 30 across Europe, North America, and Asia. English was the sole working language and a prerequisite for every hire. That year, two pieces of feedback regarding the same manager landed on my desk in the same week. A Swedish colleague reported that the manager was too direct. A Dutch colleague, recounting the same conversation, insisted the manager was too indirect, leaving everyone unclear on the objective.

Same manager, same language, same week. Both complaints were sincere and entirely valid within their respective cultural systems. The issue was not vocabulary, but expectation:

• whether “you might look at this again” constituted a suggestion or an order;
• whether a pause indicated reflection or displeasure;
• whether disagreement belonged in the boardroom or the corridor.

I have revisited that week often since relocating to Japan, largely due to a sentence that regularly concludes meetings with local firms: “We would love to work together once you have a Japanese speaker on the team.”

What a bilingual hire actually carries

Hunter Global, the practice I founded in 2023, has coached more than 600 professionals, predominantly Asian executives collaborating with European and American counterparts at firms including Netflix APAC and Naver Labs. Across these engagements, explicit verbal messages rarely fail to land but breakdowns do occur elsewhere:

• Decision-making protocols. One system views the meeting as the decision-making arena; another uses it to ratify choices made prior, where public pushback is a breach of decorum.
• Silence. Interpreted variously as agreement, dissent, reflection, deference, or a cue for seniority to speak.
• Opposition. Voiced directly in front of peers, obliquely as a query, or post-meeting via a third party.
• The scope of "yes." “Yes, I understand” and “yes, I commit” represent distinct concepts in most languages, yet merge into a single word in English-medium meetings.
  

A bilingual recruit transfers words across the table. In most cross-border teams, however, no one is bridging the structural mechanics behind them. That is why the Swedish and Dutch colleagues clashed, and why teams relying solely on fluent interpreters stall the moment genuine disagreement arises.

Deconstructing the request
The Japanese demand for native speakers usually addresses two pragmatic concerns: operational comfort (resolving issues via a swift phone call) and administrative friction, from tax filings to standardized procurement documentation. Both are essential purchasing logistics. They make a vendor easy to onboard, but do nothing to safeguard the partnership once contracts are signed. Organizations that confuse linguistic fluency with operational alignment hire a coordinator, feel temporarily reassured, and remain baffled a year later when the venture stalls.

Two distinct roles
The solution requires splitting the mandate. One role manages language and logistics: the bilingual specialist who handles contracts, paperwork, and daily touchpoints. This is a standard, easily sourced function. The second role acts as a system interpreter, making implicit behaviors legible to both sides. This job does not translate literal speech, it decodes intent: explaining why “we will consider it” was a polite refusal, why a swift Korean counter-proposal signaled respect rather than impatience, or why a European manager’s silence meant anything but consent. It is a rare, frequently unbudgeted function, and its absence is precisely what fractured a team sharing a single language in Zürich.

For founders in Tokyo or Seoul eyeing international expansion: language secures entry to the room, but system literacy maintains your seat at the table. Hiring for translation satisfies procurement, but hiring for interpretation protects the partnership. If cross-border teams want to survive beyond the honeymoon phase, they must stop looking for people who can simply translate the sentence, and start investing in those who can translate the intent.