Lost in Translation? Brazilian Tech Workers and Colonial Linguistic Imbalance in Global Development Teams

The wide extension of remote work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a significant acceleration of pre-existing trends towards global development teams bringing together tech workers based in Brazil or India to work directly for European or North American clients or subsidiaries.

Raising significant questions regarding the reproduction of a kind of colonial dynamic in the tech industry, the substantial disparities in terms of wage and employment benefits inherent to such teams are coupled with a critical linguistic imbalance, exacerbated in either non-English speaking (Brazil) or profoundly multilingual (India) countries.

Based on in-depth interviews with Brazilian tech workers – as part of a global MSCA research project across Brazil, India, Ireland and the US – focusing on personal and professional trajectories in the tech industry, this paper aims at opening up the black box of these transnational teams, looking at the way broader majority vs. minority world dynamics intersect with social and linguistic ones.

Besides the challenges of dealing with remote work or navigating between time zones and management styles, the research reveals how linguistic skills in English turned out to become social distinction criteria: putting workers with comparable technical qualifications at greater risk of discriminatory hiring practices and more vulnerable to lay-offs and direct or indirect humiliation by management or clients – contributing to a pervasive feeling of being “on the edge” and therefore hindering the possibilities to express and collectively discussed more complex social issues going beyond mere technical ones.

Conversely, it also highlights how acknowledging linguistic and cultural backgrounds, often silenced in everyday operation, can open up both spaces of resistance to foreign management and non-hegemonic common grounds to address sensitive questions – revealing how decolonial management practices and sensibilities are critical to making the global tech workplace, and the wider digitalization process, more inclusive.