Choosing the language for a training session in Seychelles

A training group in Seychelles has a language situation that is easy to misread, because on paper it looks simple. Everyone works in English. The meeting will be in English. So the session should be in English.

That is a reasonable default and it is based on the wrong test — and the reason it misleads here in particular is worth stating first.

The working language is nobody’s first

In most markets, a mixed group has a local majority operating in its mother tongue and a minority working in a second language. Here that is not the case. Most Seychellois colleagues think in Kreol Seselwa and work in English. Much of the foreign workforce is operating in English as a second or third language too.

So the room is conducting its professional life in a language that belongs to almost nobody in it. That does not make English the wrong choice — it is the language of government, of business and of most written record here, and for a mixed team it is usually the right call. It does mean that a manager cannot assume the local half of the room is at home in the session and only the visitors are working.

Following is not participating

Comprehension and production are different skills, and they separate widely under pressure. Plenty of people understand a session in their second or 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.

In practice the useful split here is rarely English against French. It is seniority and role: a group of heads of department and a group of floor supervisors are not fluent in the same register of English, and the second group is the one that goes quiet.

Why switching language in plenary 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. And the person being translated for is marked out as needing help, which does not help them contribute.

Sub-group work is the exception, and it is not the same thing. When four people who share a mother tongue go away to work a case for twenty minutes, using that language is not fragmenting the room — the room has been deliberately divided, and the sub-group is arguing at full speed instead of at the speed of its weakest English. They report back in the session language. This is how a Creole-speaking group gets the benefit of a session ABP cannot deliver in Creole, and it is worth designing into the day rather than tolerating when it happens.

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 French. Kreol Seselwa is not on either list, and we say so plainly rather than letting a local presence imply otherwise.

For a mixed team here, English is usually the right choice. For a group that is entirely Seychellois or largely francophone, French is often 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 Creole-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.