Is a translator all you need?

A few years ago, David, a friend of mine, came from America to China to meet his supplier in Beijing. His supplier speaks English. So my friend did not hire a translator. He had a meeting with his Chinese supplier the day after he arrived. We planned to have dinner with some mutual friends that evening. So I arrived at his supplier's office to pick him up at 4 p.m. sharp since he expected to finish up arround that time.
David looked frustrated. "Rebecca, I am glad you are here. Maybe you can help. I don't know why. We have talked for more than two hours. But I feel we were running around the core issue and just could not get into it. ", he said.
He quickly went through his agenda with me and explained to me that he wanted to decide on a feature list for the new products. We all sat down and I started to listen to their conversation.
It did not take long before I realize that David wanted to get the actual feature list done and his supplier thought this is just a meeting to exchange some ideas and the actual technical detail will be discussed sometime later. Therefore, David was trying to get into detail and his supplier just kept saying "...yes, that is good, we need to work on more detail of these features." instead of actually discussing the technical detail. I shared my observation with both of them and they suddenly understood why the conversation had been a little weird. David's supplier then scheduled a meeting for David to talk with his chief engineer and his marketing manager the next morning since the supplier is the general manager and did not handle those detail himself.

After we walked out the factory, David told me he did not expect this kind of problem at all since they both speak English. But I told him I saw this kind of issue all the time. Different business cultures have different ways of doing business. Although globalization has been a buzz word, culture doesn't change as fast as you wanted it to. Good communication is more than conversation in the same language. You need to understand how people are doing business in China even if you plan to get it done your way. You know what you want. But you also need to know what it is right now to figure out how to change it from its current state to your expectation.
Very simple, but hard to do.