Choosing the language for a training session in the UAE

A UAE training group frequently has no shared first language. Twelve participants might hold six between them.

The conventional way to resolve this is to find the language everyone can follow, which in practice means English. It is a reasonable default and it is based on the wrong test.

Following is not participating

Comprehension and production are different skills, and they separate widely under pressure. Plenty of people understand a session in their third language without difficulty and cannot argue in it — not because the vocabulary is missing, but because arguing requires composing a position in real time, in front of colleagues, fast enough to be relevant.

Which matters, because a training session is not a lecture. Its value comes from participants disagreeing with the method, testing it against their own situation, and rehearsing conversations out loud. A course like Self-awareness and positive communication is almost entirely practice, and a participant who cannot practise is a spectator. Someone who can follow but not contest receives a fraction of what the session offers, and usually the least useful fraction.

So the test is not “can everyone follow this”. It is: can the least fluent person in the room comfortably disagree with the trainer?

That is a higher bar, and it changes the answer more often than people expect.

When to split the group

If the answer is no, splitting the group is usually better than compromising the language.

Two cohorts of eight, each working in a language its participants can argue in, will deliver more than one group of sixteen in a language half of them merely tolerate. It costs more. It is generally still the right call, and it is worth putting that trade-off to whoever holds the budget rather than quietly accepting the cheaper option.

Why mixing languages does not work

The intuitive middle path — run mostly in English, switch when someone struggles, let colleagues translate for each other — sounds accommodating and reliably fragments the room.

Side translation creates a parallel conversation that excludes whoever is not part of it. The trainer loses the group’s shared attention. Practice exercises stop being comparable, because two pairs are working in different languages on what is supposed to be the same task. And the person being translated for is marked out as needing help, which does not help them contribute.

One language, chosen properly, beats three used opportunistically.

Materials

Written materials should be in the session language.

Translating handouts into a language not used in the room seems generous and produces two versions of the content. Participants read one and hear the other, and any discrepancy between them — and there is always a discrepancy — undermines both. Where a summary in another language genuinely helps someone, make it visibly a summary rather than a parallel edition.

What ABP does

Training and coaching are delivered in English, French or Spanish. This site is published in English and Arabic, and we state the difference plainly rather than letting a bilingual website imply Arabic-language delivery.

For a mixed group in the UAE, English is usually the right choice. Where a group shares French or Spanish, running in that language is nearly always better than defaulting to English on principle — comfort in the working language is worth more than consistency with everyone else’s booking.

Where a group genuinely needs Arabic-language delivery, we will say so rather than take the booking. That is an easier conversation to have before the invoice than after the session — and the same principle governs how we handle fees and formats.