Most job descriptions still treat this as a bonus. Somewhere near the bottom, under nice to have, next to the languages. Then the same company runs a distributed team across four time zones, sells into three markets, and wonders why the plan that worked at home lands flat two countries over.
I have been on both ends of that. Colombia, then Boston, then San Francisco, selling into the United States, Mexico and the rest of Latin America, with colleagues from Slovakia, Sweden, India, Mexico, Spain and Colombia in the same meeting.
The campaign that died in translation
The first time it cost me something, I had a campaign that performed in one market and I assumed the second one was a copy job. Same product, same proposition, translated copy. It did nothing. Not badly, which would have taught me faster. It just did nothing.
The proposition had been built on a buying reason that only existed in the first market. The words carried over and the reason did not. Translation moves language. It does not move the argument underneath.
Translation moves the words. It does not move the reason someone buys.
Silence means four different things
On a call with six nationalities, the quiet after a proposal is not one signal. It can be agreement, deference to whoever outranks you, a polite no that expects you to notice, or someone still translating in their head. Reading it as one thing gets you a project that everyone nodded at and nobody starts.
What works is boring: ask instead of infer. Name what you think you heard and let people correct it. In writing afterwards, so the person who needed the extra beat has it.
Direct is a local unit
I came up in a culture where you soften before you disagree, and then worked with people who open with the disagreement and consider that respect, because it saves everyone an hour. Neither is rude. They are different defaults, and the friction is real when nobody says which one is running.
The version of this I care about is feedback. If half the team softens and half does not, the softened notes get read as approval and the blunt ones as an attack. Once a team names that out loud, the same sentences stop meaning different things.
What I actually do about it
Rebuild the argument, not the copy. For each market, the buying reason gets rewritten from scratch. Only then does the wording get adapted.
Write after the call. The decision, in a sentence, sent to everyone. It gives the non-native speaker a second pass and it catches the nod that was not agreement.
Name the register. Say out loud how feedback travels here, so nobody has to guess whether a short note means annoyed.
Assume the market is a different market. Not a smaller version of the one that worked, which is the assumption that killed my campaign.
None of this is diplomacy for its own sake. It is what keeps a plan from arriving as a translated version of somebody else's plan, and it is the part of the job that no amount of tooling has taken off my hands yet.