Stories in Business Strategy and Translator Companies
It was in the early days of the alliance that the two companies it consisted of realized that because the national cultural aspects of the two partners were obviously different, they had to adhere to it unreservedly. Furthermore, at the beginning the usual cultural clichés of French eccentricities frightened the Chinese company, whereas the same involuntary biases of their Chinese counterparts equally challenged the employees of the French LaFever and made them feel uneasy. A Chinese Translation organization, assisted by advising them to recognize and acknowledge the resistance of such negative emotions without being censored, was part of the team of consultant psychologists that was hired with the aim of reducing the impact of the cultural crisis on them. This would only be possible if the two parties were able to acquire a sense of the self and subsequently a sense of the other, which in other words would mean they should endeavor to reach this inner frontier without trying to conquer the other culture and instead identify the positive features of the other party. In order to make this objective come true a particular attention had to be paid to language and cultural issues, but more specifically, the emotional climate for success had to be created through the metaphor.
The newly formed alliance LaFever-Quan Dong was the result of the effective acquisition of the latter by the former, speaking in financial terms. LaFever’s insistence on continuing to use the LaFever-Quan Dong Alliance metaphor has played a major role in portraying the transaction as an alliance, which has happened due to the fact that LaFever has never stopped placing such enormous importance on this portrayal. The use of the hyphen between the words LaFever and Quan Dong is the first point that stands out, and its use is governed by the idea to show the single entity both organizations represent. As the French Translation association that was employed by Quan Dong pointed out, the union between two persons is based on a legal relationship, while in military terms, it implies the agreement of two parties joining their efforts to face a common enemy, presenting a united front to win against the opposition. Thirdly, in business terms, it designates a partnership based on conviction, parity and justice, while in religion it refers to the treaty concluded between God and the Hebrew people and in rhetoric, it refers to the meeting of two different group concepts.
The alliance LaFever-Quan Dong evokes various other images and some of them are: competition between the European market and the Asian market; two competing car manufacturers for a position in the Asian market; the strengths of each party involved, their creative design and manufacturing innovativeness; as well as the juxtaposition between two different cultures, the West and the East, French and Chinese. When the notion of global citizenship was realized this led to the encouragement of the process in which the alliance raised the concept of a global citizenship, which claims to complement the identities of all parties involved. To overcome cross-cultural challenges, they hired a Korean mediator, who suggested that a strategic metaphor was to be developed which should strengthen the concept of the alliance and maximize communication within the alliance. English was to be adopted as the lingua franca of the new organization, suggested the Korean Translation proprietorship, that brought valuable help to the mediator in the negotiations.