You won’t find ‘developers’ on our team anymore, but ‘front-end developers’. We resisted this change for a long time. AITOM is a thoroughly Czech company, so why should we have a CEO rather than a director?
There are no Czech terms in the digital world
Over time, it has become clear that there are no longer adequate Czech names for many roles. We have no idea how to translate professions such as copywriter or UX designer accurately. Our industry is influenced by the English-speaking world and innovators such as Google, Facebook, Apple and many others.
By the time certain innovations reach us, the English terms have already become established. That is why we bombard you with words like SEO, PPC or USP during meetings – Czech equivalents do exist, but they are not widely used.
English titles are essential for communication outside the Czech Republic
Another reason to use English is purely business-related. We deal with international clients, and it is virtually impossible to teach them to pronounce words like ‘director’ or ‘project manager’. For a company like AITOM, this means having to prepare two sets of business cards that say practically the same thing.
Foreign clients and partners do not understand your email signature, and you have to explain several times that you are indeed competent to deal with their enquiry. In the worst case, they might mistake you for someone else, because after all, you communicated in English the first time.
Some of our existing clients have asked us whether we are needlessly destroying the Czech language. Well, we hope not. Language development is an evolutionary process, and the adoption of foreign words is simply unavoidable. Today it’s digital terminology; in the past, it was simply dialects in border regions.
Despite this minor change, however, we still strive to communicate with you clearly. We will continue to explain and simplify complex terms so that we can understand one another. Would you rather speak to a project lead than a Senior Project Manager? It’s up to you. As the saying goes: what’s in a name? You’ll still be speaking to the same Zdeněk.