Lecture 9: Verbal Intercultural Communication

"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." (L. Wittgenstein)

Let's start with a few examples:
Englishman meets American - they will use English
Scandinavian meets Dutchman - they will use English
Englishman / American / Canadian / Australian meets Belgian - they will use English
Is that a fair thing to do from a business point of view?

Interesting features of language:

• language is learned (so is culture...)
• some aspects: typical in one language, lack in others (e.g. use of tenses)
• spoken first, then written; BUT: written language is stronger (Why?)
• verbal code = phonology + morphology + semantics + syntactics + pragmatics

Interpretation is the key word (// interpreter - cf. also localisation)

We have to look for equivalences between two different languages.

Types of equivalence:

• vocabulary equivalence: word by word
• problem: Igbo (Nigeria) has no word for window (they refer to it as opening)
• idiomatic equivalence
• problem: "put this tape on the television" (what do you exactly mean?)
• grammatical-syntactical equivalence: e.g. difference between English and Turkish / Chinese / Finnish
• experiential equivalence: e.g. if you want to talk about the "television", it means that you either have a television or at least that you know (from experience) what a television is.
• conceptual equivalence: e.g. snow in Inuktitut is not just snow.