1. Why are we exposed to more intercultural and linguistic experience than ever?
„Today’s intercultural, cross-cultural, and multicultural challenges faced by organ
isations and individuals, while not new, are increasingly important in a world that encourages, and even demands, more intense and complex human interaction” - these were the opening words of the ‘96 SIETAR (The International Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) conference announcement.
But why do we have to face more intercultural interaction than before? The rea
sons are many and their interrelations make up a rather complex picture.
1. Whereas in earlier times exposure to intercultural experience was usually lim
ited to a specific group of people (diplomats, merchants, missionaries and a small number of travellers with particular scholarly interests), by now representatives of practically all professions and affiliations are affected by intercultural experience and international influence, and hence often forced to use one or more foreign languages as a means of communication. This is partly due to the expansion of mobility world
wide in the physical and geographical sense. Thanks to the development of trans
portation, a Hungarian businessman may get up in Budapest, conduct negotiations in German with his partners in Munich, and complete his day with a working dinner in Arizona, where the language used is presumably English.
2. Recent technological achievements have further facilitated our access to world
wide information without even our needing to move: with a computer on our desk the other side of the globe is within easy reach.
3. Last but not least, the development of the electronic media has produced a hitherto unimaginably rich choice of international information and intercultural exposure, with all its linguistic impacts.
All these processes are often labelled using concepts like “internationalization”
and “globalization”. One of the most obvious by-products of this process is the inter
nationalization of the English language which in a couple of decades has enjoyed a sky-rocketing career, so much so that it has risen to the status of the linguafranca of our time. However, some native speakers look on its role with a certain skepticism:
„More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it some
times seems, try to”, says the famous linguist Bill Bryson, in his book Mothertongue.
Section 1. Crosscultural Differences
2. Assessment priorities
Assessment of foreign language knowledge can be viewed from different stand
points: 1. that of the language teacher. 2. that of the speaker-language users, 3. that of the listener.
Number 2. and 3. are both users of the same means of communication, language, but their assessment of and expectations towards language competence can be very different from that of No 1 ’s whose priority traditionally goes for grammatical com
petence, or for “correctness”.
language users
native non-native
* speaker
^ -.... _
speaker k
1' listener listener '
As seen from the chart, the target group of teachers is that of non-natives, who become language-users only after having completed the phase of “language-learn
ers”.
In Hungary it is the practice, that for entering a university one has to sit for an entrance-examination. Entrance-examinations on foreign languages traditionally consist of a written and of an oral part. The written examination in its turn is split into three types of tasks; a multiple choice test; translation from the FL into mother tongue, that is Hungarian; translation form Hungarian into the foreign language.
The expected level of foreign-language proficiency is rather high, and it is not an easy matter to meet the level- requirements of the entrance examinations.
Years back, I remember, when I was working as an assistant professor, we used to spend some couple of days in assessing the written exams.
We used to work in teams - four people assessing the tests one by one, four peo
ple assessing the translation from FL in to Hungarian, and four teachers assessing the translations from Hungarian in to the FL.
I was a member of the translation group from FL into Hungarian. I remember to have long discussions among us, assessors on some students’ translation. One of our colleagues would evaluate above all the grammatical correctness of the phrases.
Another person was hunting for lexical matching. And two of us tended to give pri
ority to the communicative value of the discourse as a whole. Even a short piece of discourse like a translation task for entrance examination would be scored very dif
ferently depending on the correctness priorities of the person charged with assessment. The difference in scoring could run even to two marks on a five-mark- scale. This made me understand how different the evaluation of a foreign language performance can be depending on individuals’ priorities, on varying expectations of teachers towards language proficiency.
Judit Hidasi
3. Expectations in an intercultural context
Users of the same language might differ in their expectations towards preciseness depending on their lingvo-cultural background. The level of their tolerance and accep
tance with respect to errors might be considerably diverse in absolute as well as in relative terms according to culturally determined expectation standards.
Expectations towards language proficiency and evaluations of foreign language competence can however vary in the context of intercultural encounters as well.
There are considerable crosscultural differences to be observed as far as the over
all tolerance level of native speakers towards the language usage of foreigners is con
cerned.
The tolerance of the man-in-the-street in USA towards mistakes done by foreign
ers is remarkable. This on the other hand gives the feeling to the foreigner that he doesn’t need to make efforts to improve his English-competence because in Ameri
can communities he can get along with a modest knowledge of the language.
Cooperative attitude can be observed towards foreigners’ language mistakes in China, as well. I guess this is to be explained by the rich dialect-palette of the Chinese language. People from different regions using different dialects of the same Chinese language must make themselves understood. This is an issue of survival for them in a huge country like China.
French people on the other hand are thought to be less tolerant to mistakes of foreigners using the French language. Beautiful as it is the French language deserves to be used correctly - goes the argumentation.
As for correctness, interestingly enough there are again considerable crosscultural differences with respect to the levelsof language.
English native speakers are sensitive to pronunciation and vocabulary mistakes.
French are said to be least tolerant towards errors of grammatic nature. Hunga rians are rather tolerant on the whole - they appreciate the least effort taken on the foreigners’ behalf to challenge this difficult languages. If at all, then they would be sensitive to conjugation-errors. Japanese on the other hand are sensitive to commu
nicative mistakes of pragmatic type. The nature of sensitiveness reflects to some extent the character of the language itself. The speakers of a language with a rich morphology - like French - would traditionally be more sensitive to grammar errors, than speakers of a language with a less sophisticated morphological system. The speakers of a language with an elaborated system of honorifics tend to be sensitive of errors of that domain.
4. Hungarian vs. Japanese
On a business negotiation between a Hungarian and Japanese delegation the lan
guage used was Japanese, the interpreter being a Hungarian born woman. The busi
ness talk as it happens was rather formal, and strictly concerned the topic in ques
tion. Since the interpreter herself had an economic background, the dialogue was running smoothly, in a very informative, precise way that made communication be
tween the two parties most effective.
To my mind, both information wise and communication wise the message was transmitted by the interpreter without failure.
Section 1. Crosscultural Differences
During the lunch that followed the morning discussions I happened however to overhear the comments of the Japanese businessmen among themselves. To my great
est amazement, half jokingly, half giggling they were criticizing the Japanese language performance of the interpreter. The Japanese natives have shown great unsatisfaction.
It took considerable time to find out what made them that embarrassed. It turned out, that they disliked the way the interpreter used to refer to the company-presi
dent. She failed to use namely that sort of honorific that is normally required in for
mal talk. This made them evaluate her language-use as rude, and left them unsatis
fied with the interpreter’
s linguistic performance.
In the case of the Japanese language pragmatics plays an immense role in language performance. A greater role I would say than in Indo-European languages in general.
The underlying reason for this is best explicable in terms of CORDER. He distin
guished within verbal communication two fundamental functions: a cognitive and an attitudinal one. The cognitive function serves for describing facts, observations, actions, stating opinions, etc. The attitudinal function on the other hand enables to express the personal attitude to the things or happenings observed or to the topic of conversation or to the listener.
Japanese is a very finely tuned, sensitive language in this respect. It is clear that this is the linguistic reflection of a highly society and human-relationsconscious society.
5. Assessment of communication
The example above has also reflected another point of evaluation. In some cul
tures namely the effectiveness of communication is not primarily linked with the pre
ciseness of message-conveying. Whereas communication theories based on Euro
pean language-cultures give a high priority to preciseness of information, other-espe- cially Asian - cultures would give more value to the way of message-conveying.
In Japanese communicative behaviour for instance, on the level of smaller units of utterance too, the context-inclusive expression of ambiguity and indirectness prevail, hence leaving space for the listener to fill in non-verbalized information accordingly.
To achieve this goal a rich repertoire of linguistic means is available in the Japanese language, e. g., hedges, performatives, understatement, ellipsis, etc. This attitude is in sharp contrast to Euro-American communicative behaviour where being explicit is the expected and hence valued norm. Whereas in the Euro-American cultural envi
ronment being understood is crucial to the concept of successful communication, or to put in another way: not being fully understood amounts to miscommunication, in the Japanese communicative culture not being understood may not be perceived as miscommunication.
Japanese communicators are much more tolerant in the evaluation of efficiency in communication. Being too explicit in its turn is seen as lack of sensitiveness, and as a sign of immaturity.
„Culture and communication are inseparable because culture not only dictates who talks with whom, about what, and how the communication proceeds, it also helps to determine how people encode messages, the meanings they have for mes
sages, and the conditions and circumstances under which various messages may or may not be sent, noticed, or interpreted. In fact, our entire repertory of
communica-Judit Hidasi
tive behaviours is dependent largely on the culture in which we have been raised.
Culture, consequently, is the foundation of communication. And, when cultures vary, communication practices also vary.” (Samovar - Porter 1988: 20)
It goes without saying that crosscultural aspects of language usage have a more relevant than ever importance in our “globalizing” world.
References
Corder, S.P. 1973. Introducing Applied Linguistics. London: Penguin Books.
Grice, H P 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P. & Morgan, J.L. (eds.) Speech Acts, Syntax and Semantics 3: 41-58. New-York:Academic Press.
Hidasi, J. 1993. International Communication Traps in Management Practice and Education, In: Proceedings of the 6th Britain-Korean Conference, Seoul, Yonsei University East and West Studies Series 34/117-126.
Samovar, L.A. & Porter, R.E. (eds.) 1988. International Communication: a Reader. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publ.