When dealing with foreign investors and franchising in another country often language and interpretation of word meanings can get clouded. Additionally tenses or gender of words can change what a sentence says or means in an agreement. In franchising Internationally this becomes a real issue because of the number of potential countries an international US Based, Australian or European Based Franchisor might franchise in.

As we expanded our company into other markets we found this to be extremely problematic due to the fact that a particular country may have different dialects and issues in their own language itself, not to mention the English versions of the words and their meanings. One issue we immediately noticed when trying to deal in multiple languages is that even the topics in the table of contents were at issue. So, I addressed this issue by inserting this clause into our international contracts for franchising our business model;

7.20 Headings and Table of Contents

The headings and Table of Contents used in this Franchise Agreement are for purposes of convenience only and shall not be used in constructing the provisions hereof. As used in this Franchise Agreement, the male gender shall include the female and neuter genders, the singular shall include the plural and the plural, the singular.

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Although this did not solve all the issues it did in fact assist us in some of the issues and helped us from causing ourselves litigation issues over miss interpretations due to language barriers, mistakes or cultural differences in basic word meanings and sentence structures. Perhaps you will consider this in 2006.

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