TRANSLATION AS INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

It was E. T. Hall (1959/1990) who coined the term ‘intercultural communication’ (Rogers et al. 2002). In working with US departmental administrators andNativeAmericans, henoticed thatmisunderstandingarose not through language but through other, ‘silent’, ‘hidden’ or ‘unconscious’ yet patterned factors. In short, cultural differences. Bennett (1998: 3) explains that the fundamental premise of ‘the intercultural communication approach’ is that ‘cultures are different in their languages, behaviour patterns, and values. So an attempt to use [monocultural] self as a predictor of shared assumptions and responses to messages is unlikely to work’ – because the response, in our case to a translation, will be ethnocentric.