February 1, 2008 With corporate travelers now doing business in all four points of the globe, developing some fluency in foreign languages is getting to be as important as taking along a laptop on an overseas trip. On a visit to Moscow a friendly kak dela (how are you doing?) can be an icebreaker when meeting a Russian contact, and an obrigado (thank you) when you exist a session is Sao Paulo may be just enough Portuguese to charm your Brazilian host. Veterans of the overseas business circuit say that despite the spread of English worldwide, those linguistic gestures promte familiarity by showing that you have done your homework and care about getting along. "I have five phrases wherever I go," said Sally A. Painter, a managing director of Dutko Global Advisors, a public-policy management firm, who takes overseas business trips two weeks a month to places as diverse as Argentina, Cambodia and Latvia. Business travelers insist that those snippets go a long way to impress foregin contacts. And it is no easy task mastering even a few phrases if the language is Mandarin, the hottest newcomer on the language-training scene. Aware of the value of dealing in the mother tongue of their hosts, many traveling employees are now taking crash courses to develop more elaborate conversational skills. "Business opportunities open up when you know what people are saying and don't just depend on what a translator can tell you," said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association in New York.