How To Adapt Your Speech To A Foreign Audience And Make Them Laugh Or Cry

Problem
You are speaking at a conference overseas. What planning do you need to do?

Answer
First, understand the brief.What does the audience expect? What are their interests? What are their ages and languages?

Sometimes you will be told. Other times you can ask the orgnaizers.

Ask The Audience
Failing all else, you ask at the start of the meeting:
Please put your hand up if you have started a novel?
How many of you know the book Feel The Fear But Do It Anyway?
Please put your hand up if you have heard of Esperanto?

You can make use of somebody in the audience who is a fellow expert on the subject to support you. Or you can find somebody who knows something which makes you look an expert.

If you look at a motivation speaker such as Tony Robbins, he gets audience involvement. This makes every session have elements of novelty which keeps you alert and interested, as well as the audience.

Preparation - Local Customs
You may need to check on local views. A travel guidebook warns that when visiting one deeply religious country to say that you are an atheist will make them think you are weird, just as a deeply religious person constantly invoking God, and a particular God, at the start and end of every letter, and every conversation, will unsettle somebody from another religion or none.

Cut Jargon
Local language such as Cockney rhyming slang might be known by only half a London audience, and nobody in America and Asia, although people might be intrigued if you explain it or list items on a board.

Be positive
Any negative remark can impact your audience. It might seem only what every person is saying, or what the newspaper headlines are saying, to say that health service or transport service is in poor shape, or that you can't trust the banks or the government, or the politicians.

However, in a room of thirty people, and more so in a large crowd, you may have somebody who works in the health service, who is very upset by your remark, such as 'our health service is a disgrace'. You might then get somebody in the audience retorting angrily, "Lost of hard-working doctors and nurses, like myself ..." On one occasion, I thought my speech was received well, until somebody told me that the person sitting next to him was in the health service and felt very unhappy.

Keeping Audiences Happy
You would be better off keeping them happy, and the audience happy by saying something polite about the people, like, 'We have lots of very hard-working nurses and doctors, and they share the patients' worry that in many areas we are not getting enough funds to ensure we have enough doctors at weekend.'

Suggestions and Solutions From the Audience
That leaves room for somebody to say, "We manage perfectly well by ..."
You could reply to that, "What's your name? Dr Smith? Thank you for telling us that, Dr Smith. It shows it can be done. A round of applause for doctor Smith!"

The Sad Speech
Even more negative, is the sad speech which upsets both the speaker and the audience. My most memorable meeting was when a speaker stood up to give a planned speech and ended up saying only two sentences. "My mother wanted me to come to this country to earn money but I am not happy here. I have no friends but I can't go home because there's nothing to go home to because my mother died." He sobbed into his handkerchief and the entire room was in tears.

It was my turn to speak next, but I could hardly speak. I didn't know what to say. I turned to the leader of the organization next to me, who knew the audience, and I muttered, "Can you take over the next session?" To my surprise, she was very pleased to do so.

"Yes, I'll do yours. You do mine at the end," she agreed.

She stood up and said, "We were all deeply affected by your speech. You can see how much everybody sympathises with you. two things strike me. Firstly you have a room full of people who care about you and want to help you and from now on will be your firends and supporters. And what a brave and emotional speech. You did something amazing and wonderful Most speakers struggle for years to try to affect or involve an audience. To make them laugh and cry. You have a true talent. In your first speech, such a short one, you have managed to affect the lives of everybody, to make them care. I can see that you will be a great speaker. You will also succeed, with the help of your colleagues and new friends here, in many other things you try to do. Please, a round of appluase for our speaker!"

I was stunned. She was brilliant. I and the speaker and the rest of the audience had stopped crying and started smiling. I was able to go on with my slot.

I thought, maybe she speaks at funerals, or does motivational training. I asked her, "Where did you learn to do that, to keep up the morale of the meeting?"

She grinned, "Toastmasters!"

Cut Or ExplainLocal And National Characters
I often listen to Americans speaking and they refer to characters from Star Trek or comedy shows, or politicians or movie stars I don't know. The point the speaker is making is lost on me.

I gave an English lesson in Singapore and referred to the Beatles. Silence. After a bit, one of the girls asked me, "Who are the Beatles?"

"Best selling pop singers," I replied, "Which singers do you know?"

"Andy Lau," (or some similar name) she replied.
 I gasped, "Sorry, who?"

I realised I was as blank about popular singers in Hong Kong and Singapore as she was about those in England and America. She had the same revelation.

How do you ensure your audience understands the profession or trade of the person you are describing or quoting?You could check, "Put your hand up if you have seen the film (say movie in the USA) and ... "

However, even without doing an aside like this, you can explain to the foreign members of the audience the significance or status of the person you are mentioning. For example, "My favourite film / movie is, and I love the moment when ...."

In the same way, without drawing the attention to the fact that the audience might not know the person, you could weave in the vital information, pausing after the words which might be unfamiliar so the audience has time to repeat the name to themselves, "The Business of America is business. American President, Calvin Coolidge, said that back in the nineteen twenties, but it is just as relevant today ..."

If you want to go to a Toastmasters International meeting as a guest, they are in over a hundred countries around the world. You can type your address into the Find a Club page. You select which day or days of the week you wish to visit, and how far you are prepared to travel. You will receive a pop-up list of all the countries within the distance you specify, starting with the nearest.

Meanwhile, you can watch videos of the world's top speakers in each of the past two or three years. Then look at the websites and Facebook pages of individual clubs nearer your home or office or the country you are visiting.

I am a member of two Toastmasters clubs in London, HOD and Harrovians, and Braddell Heights Advanced club in Singapore. I have attended clubs and conferences in the UK, Singapore, Thailand, Czech Republic, China and the world finals in Las Vegas, USA.

As a native speaker of English, I am very welcome in countries where local speakers are speaking English as a second language.

https://www.toastmasters.org/find-a-club

Author
Angela Lansbury, ACG, ALB, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Singlish and English Misunderstandings

Angela Lansbury with the Singapore flag. Photo by Trevor Sharot.

Singlish Problems

Singaporeans often translate from Chinese (Mandarin) into English, word by word, instead of taking the meaning of a sentence or idiom. A British English speaker has to work hard to understand the meaning.

Singlish Solutions 

You can buy books on Singlish from book stores in Singapore and on line and probably find them in Singapore libraries.
Big dictionaries and Reference sections of libraries have books or chapters on English grammar and spelling and common errors.

Singlish Stories

White Here
A shop assistant directed the Chinese girls, all size 6 or 8, to small cubicles on the left and sent me, size 16, to a larger cubicle on the right. She said firmly, "White here."

I had heard that in Chinese foreigners were known as big noses. I wondered why white people, who wore larger clothes were sent to different cubicles. Maybe so they could find the person wanting the larger sizes. When she returned and thanked me for whiting, I realised she had meant, "Wait here".

Pronouncing L and R

Peasant Frights

On flights to and from Hong Kong the announcers really do say, Have a pleasant fright. Asians have trouble with the letters L and R. Just as I have trouble rolling the letter r in Italian, the Asians have trouble with the letter L in English.

Theme of the Day

At Toastmasters International speakers' meetings, I often hear: "I will now introduce you to the team." I expect to meet the members of the committee. Instead I hear that the team is Chinese New Year. The speaker means THEME.

TEETH and Tongue and English Pronunciation

When I am the Grammarian or Language Evaluator, I ask the audience to say TEETH. I demonstrate placing your tongue behind your top front teeth to say T, and putting out our tongue and pulling it back under your top teeth or touching your tongue three times with your top teeth while breathing out to say TH.

Similes and Metaphors

Similar to and Simile
You are very similar to your mother.
Your dress is like butterfly wings.
Your bride's dress was like a ship's sails.

Metaphor
You are your father.
Her dress was butterfly wings.
The bride was a ship in full sail.

Metaphor Wrap up
Let's wrap up the meeting.

Oxymorons

Howling Silence (title of a book by Catherine Lim).

Phrases
Raining cats and dogs. One of many phrases I had to explain when teaching English to Singaporeans in a school. They don't need to understand the origin of the phrase. They need to understand that it means raining very hard, torrential rain.

Why you should explain jargon
I am a Singapore Resident. I have lived in or visited Singapore every year for two decades. I recognize and understand:
Ni how? (Translation: How are you?)
Gong Xi Fa Chai (Happy New Year - not literally happiness but something about prosperity)
Hong Bao - red packet containing money for children and unmarried relatives or vouchers or discount coupons for customers.
Lo Hei (Chinese New Year Dish of mixed colourful shredded vegetables.)

But many foreigners won't understand Singlish. If you are a tour guide leading a group, a restaurant owner, taxi driver, or speaker in a speaking contest, one person in thirty in a room of people will not understand. They will appreciate a translation.

Anything anybody does not understand is a distraction. They might miss the next thing you say while trying to get the translation from they mobile phone. They might distract you, the speaker, and other members of the audience, by loudly whispering to the person next them: "What did he say?"

If you are in a speaking contest and the vote is divided, one extra judge is the pre-arranged tie-breaker. If the contest has a clear winner, that one person has no vote. But two speakers might get an equal number of votes. You can have as few as five judges and three speakers. The voting could be as low as two each for two speakers, one vote for the third speaker. The result of the competition is decided by the one vote of the tie breaker. If they cannot understand the punchline of your speech, the title, the joke, the dialogue, they are likely to give their vote to the other speaker.

Singlish Misunderstanding Of Lend and Borrow
Singaporeans often confuse lend and borrow. This is because Mandarin has one word for both, bi-directional, a bit like our English word exchange.

Singlish Tips

Use the grammar and spell checker on our computer to edit the draft of any speech or greeting you are planning when meeting people who speak English or Singlish. You can buy books on Singlish.

Author Angela Lansbury

Angela Lansbury, English language teacher and tutor. I visit Toastmasters Clubs in the UK and Singapore and have tight workshops in China and Singapore on public speaking and English grammar and pronunciation. I also teach individuals as a home tour and on Skype.