As the British business community becomes increasingly internationalized, it should show more interest in language-related matters. After a review of the literature, this paper reports on a study of the 100 largest British industrial companies. The conclusions are as follows: (1) a wide variety of British employees are involved in international business correspondence tasks; (2) employees are selected for international business correspondence tasks primarily because of their business-related, not language- and communication-related knowledge, skills, and attitudes; (3) English is the dominant language in outgoing and incoming international business correspondence; (4) about half of the companies use their own employees to translate international business correspondence unless it is highly complex or technical; (5) employees who are fluent for business purposes in a second language would be satisfactorily prepared for international business communication in most companies; and (6) most companies have small proportions of employees who can transact business in two or more languages. Contains 21 references. (Author/LB)