Translating NLP for Abroad -- The French Experience

by Brian Van der Horst

NLP is taken perhaps more seriously in France than in any other country in the world. In 1985, when I began teaching NLP in Paris, my company took an informal poll. Nearly 95% of the French companies and 75% of the training and consulting organizations we talked to had never heard of NLP. Two years later, the figures had reversed.

Within three years, I began to see NLP included in business and medical school curriculum, wherever communication courses were taught. In l988, an association of French NLP practitioners, masters and trainers was launched, and by l990, they had grouped together virtually all the training organizations in the country run by certified trainers-- a global first.

Today, more than 20 original NLP books have been published in French, about 15 organizations give practitioner programs and around 80 training organizations give programs that are either introductions to or applications of NLP.

Not bad for a little country of 55 Million people.

In the years between l985 and l988, I saw a growth in NLP in France that had taken over ten years to accomplish in the States.

How did this phenomenon take place?

I think it's worth taking a look the French experience of NLP. In it lies many lessons. Perhaps the greatest lesson is that, in a new country, it is possible to choose and create a context in which NLP can thrive.

I don't have all the answers, but I've spent eight years adjusting how I was taught to teach NLP so that it would be appropriate for the French and European audiences.

I'd like to share what I've learned pretty much as it happened to me, for I think there is a model to be made of the corporate and administrative skills an international NLP organization can apply to produce a thriving learning community, as well as the competences that individual trainers can acquire to produce maximum educational results overseas.

The characteristics of such a model for a company might include:

1. The ability to create a context of professionalism.

2. The ability to present and market professionally.

3. Training with heart, rigour and commitment.

4. Encouraging and creating your own competition.

I will be developing these themes in future articles, but for the trainer, I think the list can include:

1. Learning the host country's language or learning how to be translated.

2. Pacing the host culture: learning and citing historical references and culture-specific, relevant teaching examples.

3. Pacing the cognitive styles. In France, for example, divergent and convergent thinking patterns.

3. Producing relevant teaching materials: Translating and Reverse translation. Working constantly on updating and revising materials.

4. Pacing the high context Vs. high content cultural styles, and the differing time orientations of the host culture.

5. Public relations: giving free introductions in schools and professional organizations and colleges.

6. Humility and respect for other disciplines.

7. Pacing the action chains, or social and business rituals of the host culture.

For this article, I will give a short biographical version of how I came to France, and will deal specifically with the contextualizing and language problems of teaching NLP in a foreign country. I'll speak to the other points in subsequent articles.

* * *

I took my first NLP course in l979. A girlfriend had been getting "magic buttons" -- happy anchors from Dr. Genie Laborde, who had just finished her practitioner at Santa Cruz. I had been working at Stanford Research Institute as a consultant to their Values and Lifestyles Program. I had seen the logo of the Society of NLP on the old Division of Training and Research building, and had thought it was just another California craziness.

I asked Genie, just what is this NLP? She asked if I wanted a demonstration instead of an explanation. Was there something I wanted to change? I said I'd like to stop smoking. In about 40 minutes, she chained me some resource anchors. I stopped smoking for seven years.

That got my attention.

By 1983 I was managing the NLP Center for Advanced Studies in the SF Bay area for Lynne Conwell, then director. Our trainers were Leslie Cameron-Bandler, David Gordon, Michael Lebeau, Barbara Whitney and others. I was leading introductions, study groups and learning how to become a trainer.

Gene Early, based in Copenhagen, had been teaching NLP in France from time to time since l982. Our Center would send him trainers, so it was no surprise when a group of French psychologists called up the Center one day and asked if someone could give them half a day of NLP training. I had taken two years of French in high school, another in college, so I was volunteered.

Thank god they were travelling with a simultaneous translator. Three years of French had only given me some vocabulary and verb declensions. I quickly learned that University French is not spoken by living French. I gave the standard presentation and demonstrated a six-step reframe. They invited me to come to Paris. I was impressed with how easy it was to work with a translator. More than 70 % of the words in English and French are the same, I told myself. The major difference is the spelling, as in the difference between er and re, and in pronunciation. So I thought it would be easy to translate NLP into French. I can do this, I said to myself.

Three months later I was giving a presentation to around 125 people in the Hotel California, just off the Champs-Elysees, in Paris. After another three months, my sponsoring group of psychologists put together another San Francisco junket. Twenty-five people arrived, and I gave them two weeks of NLP training at the Hotel California, just off Union Square in San Francisco. This group now included human resources and development executives as well as dentists, doctors and the core group of shrinks. They invited me back to Paris to do six weeks of training.

Notice the amount of personal contact I went through-- and this is the short version-- to get an invitation to train in France. This is one of the first cultural differences I began to perceive. I should have guessed it from my rudimentary command of French. The root of their word for knowledge-- savoir-- is savorer, or to savor gustatorily. They have more cooking metaphors is their language than any other category. When a Frenchman want to do business with someone, he has to establish a relationship first. A kinesthetic connection. The whole culture is more kinesthetic (including olfactory and gustatory) than any other I've worked with.

My sponsor had sent my trainer's fees by wire to my bank in San Francisco. The way French banks work, the payment arrived six weeks after I arrived home. My credit card companies began to cancell my cards, because I had not received my expenses to cover what I had laid out for my travel in Europe. A wire transfer normally takes a 36 hours in the States. I kept calling and calling, my sponsor decided the relationship was strained, and decided not to pursue the business. I could not believe the red tape the French went through. He could not take that I questioned his inability to change the slow payment. Because the relationship did not work-- no business was possible. This is quite different from the US, where often we will do business with someone even the relationship is not optimal.

Fortunately, another student decided to sponsor my seminars, and we decided to take care of our relationship first. We formed a partnership with another student, and launched our company.

At this time, there were two other companies training NLP in France. Both had been started by former therapists. When we started our company, we made a basic policy decision that, in my mind, changed the course of NLP in this country.

We decided to teach NLP only to professionals. We decided against giving NLP seminars as self-development, come and cure all your ills, get better and do this instead of therapy programs. We decided to teach NLP only to those people who already had a serious professional commitment-- a job to which they could apply NLP.

We also turned away those who wanted to become NLP Therapists. We would say to those in search of a profession, "What you want does not exist. There are NLP practitioners and then there are therapists. NLP and therapy are two different professions. Here is a list of schools that teach how to become a therapist. If you want to become a therapist, go see them. Then come back to us and we can teach you how to apply NLP to therapy."

We also decided to be a trainers' training organization. About 40 % of our students have been people who already teach in business, medical, or educational contexts. We also decided to train more NLP Trainers.

One of the other NLP trainers in France questioned me about the wisdom of training trainers. I told him that I thought my job was to train my students to be better than I was. Wasn't this the job of all teachers?

But this risks to get out of hand, he warned me. He had some concerns about the market place. Oh, you mean competition?

I told him my take on competition is that

A. Competition exists because you are doing something valuable.

B. Competitors are your teachers in how to get better at what you do.

C. If you are a teacher, your job is to teach people to be better at what you do than you are.

D. If you are successful in the preceding, your own students will be your own competition within three years.

E. You want to have competition that is at least as good as you so that you can handle your overflow with integrity. If you are good at what you do, there will always be an overflow.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of these presuppositions. Half of the NLP books now in French are the products of former students-- as are the competing organizations.

By this time I had begun to learn a lot more useful French than I had ever picked up in school. I was learning my listening to my interpreters. There are two ways to get translated if you are not fluent in your host country's language. Simultaneous and Sequential translation. With simultaneous, you have someone talking over your words. Normally this is done from a translators'booth, and the audience receives their own language over headphones. This is the way they do it at the United Nations, or in major companies.

Sequential translation is more appropriate to teaching NLP. It works like this. You are a trainer in front of your group. You have just imparted some morsel of timeless wisdom. You pause, while your translator takes over. Whatever comes out of your mouth gets translated. At this moment, you are trying to think of what you are going to say next. Your consciousness is not on the foreign language at this instant, and your own words-- coming back translated to you-- have a chance of sinking in your own subconscious.

Sequential translation is a great way to learn a language.

As you get more competent in the foreign language, your concerns multiply. First, you have to know what you are going to say well enough to be able to chunk and time it appropriately for a foreign audience. This means you have to know when to start, when to stop to give the interpreter time to translate, and how to pick up the thread.

So you have to calibrate your translator for understanding, and overwhelm. If you give him too many words, he can't remember what you've said. And he'll be forced to summarize. If he doesn't understand the nifty jargon you have just introduced, worse-- he'll have to improvise.

Then there is the structure of different languages. If you give your translator too few words, he won't be able to translate. English is a transformative language. One word at the beginning of a phrase will change the whole sentence. French is a adjunctive language. Often you don't know the meaning of the sentence till you hear the last word. In the beginning, my translators would say, "Go on... " instead of translating, because of the syntax of French, they would have to start from the end instead of what I thought in English was the beginning of the thought.

So to be more effective, I would start to think how I could construct my sentences in English so that they could be translated more easily to French. This is also a matter of time management. French is a third redundant over english. It takes 33% more time to say what you want to say in French than it takes to say in English. So to teach a 24-day practitioner in the time I'm used to taking, I have to remember that everything I say -- and all the responses I'm going to have translated from my students--is going to take twice the time to do, plus 33%!

What a wonderful opportunity to learn economy, elegance and discretion.

But the duties of a NLP Trainer being translated do not stop there. I also have to calibrate the group, to see if they are following, understanding, and learning. I have to manage the behavior of my translator so that he is demonstrating what I am demonstrating. I have to be vigilant over the criterial choices of my translator.

Like any other human being, he or she will use their own criteria and anchors for important concepts.

I am in front of a group trying to get across experiences and distinctions that are difficult enough for the uninitiated to grasp in English. I start talking about "acknowledging" people for their contributions to your life.

The word doesn't exist in French. The nearest things are concepts like being aware, giving credit, and being grateful. I have burned out many translators because I would make them go through a list of synomyns until I found the closest equivalent in the French context. Naturally, some of these people feel real put out that I don't accept their definition for a word.

I can't accept their definition until I know they have really had the experience. Many times in France, I have had to stop and give my translators an experience before they could begin to help me find expressions which would shift a student's world view.

Then too, I have to be careful of my anchors, the translator's anchors, visual, spacial, tonal and digital; and then try to give the kind of multi-level, overlapping realities type of teaching that creates good NLP students.

Yup, if you can understand enough of the language that you are being translated to, there are a lot of balls to keep in the air at the same time. If you are ignorant, it's easier. But you'll end up calibrating weird things in your audience instead of understanding.

Fortunately, after the first two years, three of my translators were master practitioners.

The first thing I noticed about the French was that despite how incredibly kinesthetic they are as a culture, they don't have a word for emotions like we do. They use the English word "Feeling" because their choices are limited to sentiments, emotions, and desires.

If you are searching for a particular connotation in English for French, I've found one of the easiest ways is just to go through your own list of synonyms in English. One or two of the words you find in your own personal thesaurus is bound to be French.

The job of being translated simultaneously, thinking of 7 logical levels at the same time while teaching through someone who was translating my words with their own criteria was not my most fascinating problem.

I was having these difficulties getting some of the basic NLP presuppositions across to the French. In California, it was easy to suggest that there is a difference between behavior and self. One does dumb things from time to time, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are a dummy. You have your emotions, you get happy or sad from time to time, but emotional choice is possible.

Then I began to look at the linguistic environment of the French. They have this tense, called the subjunctive, that is especially made to indicate that emotions are the "unreal tense." It is used to indicate that emotions exist outside of human beings, and then act, like a cause, on people who have behaviors, like the effect. Nice, huh?

I had to produce some new experiences in my French audiences before they would even consider separating behavior from self. One of the best examples I found is wetting your pants.

My students would say, well, if you have a kinesthetic stimulus, you have to act on it, right? Emotions move you. If that was true, I would say, then we would all be wearing diapers. It is a very natural, kinesthetic signal to want to pee in your pants. But we have all learned to do differently, at choice.

It is even difficult to talk about possibility in French. There are approximately twice as many modal operators of necessity and half the modal ops of possibility in French than in English.

Of course, in terms of translating NLP into French, there is also the whole non-verbal spectrum to consider. Our hand signals for "OK" and "thumbs up," mean "zero" and "one beer!" to the French. Their tonal expressions for bored sound like ours for vomiting.

Even animal sounds are different. These are the sounds the same animals make in different languages:

For the past three years, I have spoken French well enough to lead my seminars without a translator. Even though I still have a terribly American accent, and some of my constructions need to be re-worded two or three times until I hit the right combination, the students are satisfied. But even today, I would not dare to teach hypnosis is French-- there are too many fine shadings and layered ressonances that I still have not mastered.

I could go on and on about the differences between French and English, but if even the animals don't speak a universal language-- don't expect your high school language lessons to be much help. If you are going overseas, think about getting a good translator if you aren't fluent in the contemporary use of the language of your target country. NLP is too important, and too precious a tool for the evolution of humankind to do a half-cocked -- or is that cocorico?-- job of getting the message through.

Originally Published in Anchor Point, October, 1992