How Travelling Helps To See The Cultural Aspects Of Communication

[Melissa Thomas]

The word “communicate”, just like many other English words, comes from the Latin “communicare” which used to mean “to share something”. Actually, it does mean to share information, exchange it with other living creatures. People and some highly organized animals can communicate with each other by means of speech, gestures and other visual signals, in written form and by conducting various types of behavior. Humans may communicate intentionally or unintentionally, and the human communication can be both linguistic and non-linguistic. When speaking about communication, one first of all means linguistic communication, a communication which presupposes linguistic means. Communication, however, may take different forms, depending on who is communicating with whom. Communicational techniques may be adjusted when dealing with people of different sex, age or social group, with foreigners, with disabled people and so on. In this example of a case brief, we would like to show how the notion of culture is described.

Some people strongly believe that it is labor that made a human out of a monkey. Others believe that people have become real humans after the first word was uttered. Anyway, this shows how important is a role played by communication in the life of any human being. It is impossible to overestimate its role in the life of a modern person. People communicate with each other, with animals, with mechanisms and electronic devices. However, when speaking about communication, one is most likely to mean interpersonal communication between two or more human beings. There are many ways in which people can pass information to each other: gesture, posture, clothing, and haircut, as well as the ways of speaking - intonations and so on. However, these methods are not precise. One is unable to transfer exact information by means of these methods. Words provide people with much more preciseness. It is possible to describe pictures in many details, or be exact about one's desires and wishes. However, there are certain barriers which stand in the way of interpersonal communication. Such barriers may be one's severe disability. For instance, if a person cannot hear, it is necessary to adjust one's communicational technique so as to take this into consideration and not to use one's voice for transferring information. One's voice modulations and the tone of conversation will tell nothing to a person who cannot hear, and it should be taken into consideration. A visually impaired person is very unlikely to comprehend and, therefore, interpret the language of gestures, expression of the partner's face and so on. Another barrier is distance. People have worked out special techniques of communication with people who are separated from them either in distance time, or both. Different kinds and means of language are used for communicating with somebody who is here and ready to communicate, or who is on the other side of the telephone line, or with somebody whom an SMS is sent to, or an email, or a letter, etc. Online chat is yet another kind of communication.

Communication is often referred as a process of encoding, sending, receiving, and decoding of information; it is so to a large degree. However, other processes and conditions interfere with this process of integrity of communicational progress. Such conditions or processes are called noises. The most simple, easy to understand and explain kind of noise is environmental noise. It is physical noise which does not allow one person to clearly hear the other participant of conversation. Two people, separated from each other with a telephone line, or, rather to say, connected with each other by means of telephone connection, may not hear each other clearly. For instance, in case of an analogue telephone line or crowded place of location, the communicators may misunderstand each other and even lose the whole message.

There are other sorts of noise: psychological noise, noise of physiological impairment (cases of which have been mentioned above), organizational noise, and cultural noise.

Cultural differences traditionally cause lots of misunderstandings, heavily inflicting communicational process of different people. This can be compared to using different programming languages, or broadcasting at different wave lengths. The ancient Bible legend about the Babylon tower tells a lot about how serious consequences of speaking different languages can get. The legend tells the reader that people were punished by making several languages of the one which was spoken and understood by everybody. Nowadays, people hardly comprehend this as a punishment. Many people believe that the world is beautiful in its diversity. What is more, the world is beautiful due to its diversity to a large degree. It is so nice that different people speak different languages, and it is so interesting to get to know different cultures. On the other hand, the world is becoming more and more global. Consequently, the more global it becomes, the more important it is to avoid cultural noises. Moreover, it is of vital importance not to allow cultural communication be interfered with one's ignorance of the culture of other people, he or she deals with.

The cases of cultural noise are by far not limited only to different languages and dialects. The representatives of different religions may have different attitudes to the same actions or symbols. It is in European and American tradition for the representatives of different genders to physically touch each other when greeting or saying goodbye. Such touches will mean nothing to either party. However, this may be quite a serious message for the representatives of other cultures, for instance, eastern cultures.

It often happens that totally unacceptable things in one society are regarded as good manners in some other society. In some countries, it is impolite to stand up from the table without letting go of the air in the stomach through one's thread in a loud and clear way. This action is meant to inform a person who is in charge of the food on the table that the meal was great, and the guest is happy and deeply satisfied with it. It also means that the guest is not hungry anymore. In other cultures, such an action will cause a long, awkward silence, and a person who did so will be considered a very rude and impolite.

There are numerous other examples to be provided, but there is one conclusion to be made: a person in the contemporary world needs to know more about other cultures. Now people from all around the world have to deal with each other more frequently and more tightly. That is why it is so important to know and understand each other's culture and take this knowledge into consideration when communicating with each other.

Many scientific subjects, studying cultural aspects of communication refer to such disciplines as intercultural communication and cross-cultural communication. For more and more professions, it is compulsory to study subjects related to cultural aspects of communications, and there is nothing strange about it. There are more and more people belonging to diverse cultures living very close to each other, having business and personal relations with each other, studying abroad and so on. Therefore, all these peculiarities need to be taken into consideration when working out a business plan, curriculum, and so on.