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Вестн. Моск. ун-та. Сер. 19. Лингвистика и межкультурная коммуникация. 2017. № 4
ПЕРЕКРЕСТНЫЙ ГОД НАУКИ: РОССИЯ И ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИЯ
Svetlana G. Ter-Minasova
CHALLENGES OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION:
A VIEW FROM RUSSIA
Lomonosov Moscow State University 1 Leninskie Gory, Moscow, 119991
The paper is dealing with a most topical concept and problem the mankind is confronted with nowadays: that of intercultural communication. It has got into the centre of scholarly and public attention for two main reasons which are closely intertwined: the processes of globalization and the technological breakthrough which has given new opportunities for free mass communication through the Internet.
The key questions discussed in the paper can be presented as follows: 1) the language and culture barriers on the way to efficient intercultural communication; 2) the peculiar and at the same time heroic efforts to find means of intercultural communication behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union; 3) language and cultural difficulties hampering intercultural communication coming mainly from differences in the English and Russian languages accompanied by those in the cultural visions of the world by the two nations (different language pictures of the world).
Key words: language; culture; intercultural communication; language and culture differences; volume of semantics; stylistic connotations; speech usage; collocability of lexical units; sociocultural connotations; dialectical contradictions of intercultural communication.
The problems of communication in general and intercultural communication in particular have become especially urgent nowadays for very obvious social, political, economic and other reasons.
It has become crystal-clear that the future of mankind depends on the so-called "human factor", i.e. on whether people of different nations, ethnic groups representing different cultures will manage to find a common language, figuratively speaking.
Speaking literally, however, language is the main means of communications. Again, I am afraid, this is something well-known and obvious, however, another well-known truth is that obvious things are most easily ignored and forgotten, they are lying on the surface and therefore remain unseen and unnoticed — this is one of many paradoxes of human perception.
Svetlana G. Ter-Minasova — Doctor of Philology, Professor, President of Faculty of Foreign Languages of Lomonosov Moscow State University (e-mail: president@ffl.msu.ru).
Therefore, I dare draw your attention to such an obvious thing as linguistic and cultural aspects of intercultural communication.
Nowadays the term "intercultural communication" is extremely popular and widely-spread.
However, strangely enough, 30 years ago in Russia it was almost unknown for the simple reason that intercultural communication with nations using the languages under study did not exist. Soon it turned out to be an unpleasant surprise: the language barrier was inextricably intertwined with another barrier: the cultural one.
Let's go back to paradoxes of human nature: When the Iron Curtain was raised and the era of free international mass communication began, supported by the Advent of the Internet, that is when the political barrier ceased to exist, the language barrier seemed to be a trifle after so-called "Iron Curtain" having separated Russia from "capitalist" countries and nations. Unfortunately, it was mainly their foreign languages that were an obligatory subject at all levels of language education in the USSR. As a result of this strange (putting it mildly) situation, studying most important — academically, historically, traditionally, culturally — languages was somewhat one-sided (putting it very mildly) Out of the four main skills needed for successful communication three were ignored because there was nobody (first) to speak or (second) listen to. As for the third one, — writing, it was simply dangerous because it was a document of actual contacts with "potential enemies". This collocation went most frequently with the word languages of the nations behind the Iron Curtain. Interestingly, the same term was used in the armies of the USA and Great Britain where 'Russian as a language of potential enemies' was a must on the programmes for military service. (Later the former USA Army soldiers who became well-known academics in American Universities were the first to start cooperation with Russian Universities. The best of them (rather — whom I knew best of all) told me, 'When I was doing Russian in the Army Moscow was like the Moon for me.')
Thus, "the human factor" that was mentioned at the beginning implies two barriers on the way of human communication: linguistic and cultural ones.
The language barrier is known from the time of the Tower of Babel. The cultural barrier is unseen until a clash between your own indigenous culture and an alien one takes place. At best these clashes are surprising, but usually they are off-putting or shocking (hence, the term culture shock).
The cultural barrier is far more dangerous than the language barrier. It is made, as it were, of absolutely transparent glass and is imperceptible until one ends up with a black eye, having bumped into it. It is dangerous, too, because cultural mistakes are usually taken much more to heart than language ones are, and this despite the fact that the former are far more excusa-
ble: there are no general rules — no grammars, nor dictionaries of culture — in order to help one avoid cultural mistakes like in the case of languages. We all know from our own experience that native speakers are usually quite good-natured about the mistakes we make when speaking their language. But cultural mistakes, as a rule, are not forgiven so easily and often produce a very negative impression or even cause aggressive reactions.
This leads to a conclusion: all the intricacies and depth of the problems inherent in inter-linguistic and cross-cultural communication are shown up particularly clearly, and sometimes even acknowledged, in juxtaposition of foreign languages with one's own mother tongue, and of foreign cultures with one's native culture.
Indeed, only the knowledge of at least two languages and two cultures reveals certain concealed characteristics — as distant horizons are revealed from mountain tops — and, accordingly, concealed difficulties not visible from the level of one language. Thus, an important practical conclusion may be drawn: native speakers who teach their mother tongue as a foreign language and who do not know the mother tongue of their students see neither the concealed characteristics nor the concealed difficulties. And this accounts for a great advantage — surprise, surprise! — enjoyed by non-native teachers of foreign languages over native speakers of these languages.
What are the main linguistic difficulties hampering international and intercultural communication?
First of all, as the subject of this paper is "Challenges of intercultural communication", it is necessary to state the interrelation between language and culture. They are inseparable. Language is part of culture and culture is part of language.
The interrelation of language and culture is traditionally expressed through widely-used metaphors: language is a mirror of culture, it reflects the world around us and the world inside us. Moreover, it also reflects a people's collective- self-consciousness, its mentality, national character, way of life, customs and traditions, moral standards and values, and world outlook, and all this is the anthropological culture of a nation.
Language is a treasure-house, repository of culture. Cultural traditions and values are stored in all its forms — lexis, grammar, idioms, proverbs, sayings, in folklore, fiction and non-fiction, oral and written discourse.
Language is a transmitter, a carrier of culture; it passes on the treasures of national culture that are preserved in it from generation to generation. Learning their native language, children also assimilate the generalized cultural experience of preceding generations.
Language is an instrument of culture. It moulds the identity of a native speaker as well as one of a nation by forcing upon him or her the world-view, mentality, attitude to people, a system of values etc., inherent — preserved —
in it. Otherwise speaking, it forms the culture of people who use this language for communication and imposes it on them.
As a mirror language reflects not just culture but the whole world surrounding us. It creates, as is very well known, a language picture of the world. This picture is nation-specific and imposed on the native speakers of the language.
Developing this metaphor with a picture, what language reflects can be presented as a mosaic which is made of little pieces — words and other language units functionally equivalent of words.
Thus, learning a language in general and a foreign language in particular begins with learning a word — first the sound (oral form) or the look of it (written form) — and then the meaning. The forms of words of different languages are obviously different (the Tower of Babel!) but their meanings must be the same to make international communication possible.
In other words, we are learning a foreign language in order to be able to communicate, but communication is possible only on the basis of a shared code. To share a code you must know the meanings of foreign words and the meanings must be the same in both languages for if they are different the code is not shared.
However, words of different languages denoting the same things may be different in many ways.
1. The volume of semantics (the sizes of corresponding pieces of the two mosaics). The Russian dom has a broader meaning than the English house: it includes home, building, block of flats, condominium, mansion, cottage, bungalo, etc.
2. Stylistic connotations: bagrovy and crimson coincide semantically but bagrovy has negative connotations while crimson is neutral. (Pieces of the two mosaics differ in colour or shades of colour, or connotations.)
3. Use in speech (dom — in a Russian address: Dostoevsky Street, dom 10; in English it is: 10 Downing street).
4. The more concealed are collocational (or lexical-phraseological) constraints governing the use of language. This means that any word in any language has its own, characteristic only of the language in question, set or reserve of words with which it is compatible. That is to say, it is 'friends' and harmonizes (combines) with certain words and is not 'friends', and therefore never harmonizes (combines) with others. Why does the English verb to pay (give somebody money for goods, services, etc.) collocate with such incompatible — from the Russian point of view — nouns as attention, visit, compliments? Why are the Russian word combinations высокая трава (lit., high grass), крепкий чай (lit., firm tea), сильный дождь (lit., strong, powerful rain) translated into English as long grass, strong tea and heavy rain?.
There is only one answer to this: each word has its own mode of collocation. And it is nation-specific (not universal) in the sense that it is charac-
teristic only of a given word in a given language. The specific character of collocation becomes evident only in juxtaposition with other languages much as one becomes aware of one's own culture through coming into contact (clashing) with an alien culture. Thus, native speakers of a language do not see the problem, it never occurs to them that in a certain language tea can be strong and compliments — paid.
Lexical collocation undermines the foundations of translation and interpretation. Bilingual dictionaries are a case in point. The translation of words with the help of a dictionary that gives "equivalents" of their meanings in another language can lead students astray and encourage them to use foreign words in contexts typical of their own language.
Let us take, for example, a very common word книга and its English equivalent book. English-Russian dictionaries give this word in its most frequently occurring collocations:
A book on/about birds — книга о жизни птиц A reference book — справочник A cheque book — чековая книжка Ration books — карточки To do the books — вести счета
Our order books are full — мы больше не принимаем заказов To be in smb's good/bad books — быть на хорошем, плохом счету I can read her like a book — я вижу ее насквозь We must stick to/go by the book — надо действовать по правилам He was brought to book for that — за это его привлекли к ответу Only one of these is translated into Russian as книга. These differences in collocations may be culturally striking. For instance, one can shock an audience by stating that native speakers of English, as is indicated by the language, do not wash their heads. And, indeed, in the direct sense — with soap and water — they do not. They wash their hair, the equivalent to the Russian word combination мыть голову (lit., to wash one's head). It is surprising, with political correctness being such an issue today, that nobody has become concerned about hurting the feelings of the bald. Do they also have to say to wash one's hair in English although it would come more naturally to them to say, as in Russian, to wash one's head? We all have heads, but as for hair... The English expression, to wash one's head, is used figuratively and here its meaning is close to the Russian — also figurative — expression намылить кому-нибудь голову/шею (lit., to soap sb's head, neck, fig., to reproach sb severely).
Another example. Within the same syntactic pattern "Adjective + Noun" the word dead may realize the lexical meaning "no loger living" with names of plants, animals, persons, but, with nouns denoting periods of time (hours, days, weeks, seasons, etc.) it means "without movement or activity": in the dead hour of the night implies "when everything is quiet". "A dead
hour" is also the time of daytime sleep after lunch in children's institutions. The same word combined with colour terms means lacking brilliance, with nouns denoting sound — dull, heavy.
Thus, the "equivalence" of words of different languages seems to be more and more unrealistic, or, rather, less and less probable. But even in those rare cases when all these purely linguistic moments actually correspond in different languages and words seem to be fully equivalent, one should not forget about extra-linguistic differences, i.e. the fact that both the things and the concepts underlying the things can differ.
5. Sociocultural connotations.
At this point the equivalence of meanings turns into a real problem. The problem is that the so-called "meaning" of the word (usually defined as a reference of a certain complex of sounds or graphic signs (letters) to a thing or phenomenon of the real world) can be seen as a thread connecting the world of language/speech with the world of reality. Or, rather, it is a path leading from the world of language/speech to the real world. Then every word of every speech community leads to the world where the language-users live, and can be fully understood only in the socio-cultural context of its world.
And here comes the most difficult and controversial point of dialectics of communication.
As is well-known, the concept of dialectics dates back to the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535 — c. 475 BC) who put forward the idea that everything is in a constant change as a result of inner strife and oppositions. The opposing forces are contradictions. Consequently, the development of human knowledge and society is a dialectical process based on the clash of contradictions.
There is no doubt that a most important factor in the life and progress of mankind is a very well developed system of human communication. And that is where Language comes into play because the natural human language, both oral and written, is the main means of communication. (There is no harm in repeating this common truth because it is the pivot of the paper.)
The basic, permanent contradiction of communication appears to be implicit in the definition of language given by most dictionaries: a system of sounds, symbols, etc. for communicating thought. This widely known definition emphasizes the most important function of language: realizing thoughts by means of language units, expressing, exchanging, putting them into practice through words and their equivalents. The key role of a thought expressed by a language unit and thus put into action, is well illustrated by an English set-phrase: in thought, word and deed (from the Book of Prayers).
But where does the basic contradiction between thought and word come from? It becomes especially clear and vivid in the case of international, in-terlinguistic communication.
For example, why is a simple English sentence: That morning she had a headache and stayed upstairs untranslatable into Russian, or, to put it more mildly, very difficult to translate into Russian?
The short answer to this is: the problem arises because a word is not just a label attached to an object or a phenomenon of reality. However, this categorical statement requires an explanation, which will involve, among other things, again repeating some well-known truths.
Every natural human language is supposed to reflect the world, or rather both the outer and inner worlds of human beings. This is illustrated by a popular metaphor: Language is the mirror of the world/culture. Communication, first and foremost, implies giving and/or exchanging information. The relation between the human language and the world it reflects seems to be close and direct: The human language reflects the world (or — rather — the worlds, both the outer and the inner ones) by means of its units: words and their equivalents. Thus, there seems to be two levels: the level of the World with objects and phenomena that live and function there and the level of Language where linguistic units (words and their equivalents) live and function, expressing the objects and phenomena of the world. The relation may ne illustrated by fig. 1 representing the two levels participating in human communication.
Fig. 1
World -► Language
i I
objects, phenomena words, their equivalents
If it were so straightforward and simple, communication would be also easy and simple, which would make language teachers, and especially translators and interpreters the happiest professionals in the world.
However, it is not so.
The last two words in the given example — stayed upstairs — do refer to seemingly clear objects of the real world but they cannot be adequately understood and translated into another — Russian — language (and, possibly, many other languages as well) because the English concept of a house with specific functions of upstairs in contrast with downstairs is different (and therefore, meaningless) to Russian culture (and to some others). Therefore, it cannot be translated, i.e. expressed by linguistic means of those other languages that reflect culturally different worlds. Russian houses may have two or more floors and there will be upstairs and downstairs in them, but the problem with understanding the simple sentence arises from the difference in the cultural concept of a dwelling expressed by the words house in English and dom in Russian.
The cultural and social structure of dom in the Russian-speaking world is not so strict and rigid as in the English house where upstairs implies only bedrooms and bathrooms, while downstairs is where the family's active life goes on: cooking (kitchen), eating (dining room), rest and entertainment (sitting room), etc. In a Russian house bedrooms may be on both (or all) floors including downstairs: the ground floor is usually preferred by the older generation of the family. More than that. In the North of Russia (Arkhangelsk region, for example) "upstairs" (which is the second floor in Russia) is where the livestock remains through the cold season which lasts for about seven months. Geography and climate have determined the "strange" but actually very clever idea which saves both the health, time and money of the owners of the livestock. Heating a cattleshed during a long and cold Russian winter is not only expensive but it also requires a lot of hard and tiresome labour. In mid-autumn, with the first hints of cold weather, the livestock is herded "upstairs" along a ramp made of logs and stays there till spring. The people "downstairs" stoke the stove, the warm air rises and keeps animals warm. This is an example of the concept of a dwelling in a particular region of the country and it is determined by the climate. It is obvious that even within one nation a word of the national language may imply a different concept of the object of the world depending on many conditions including climate.
Thus, it becomes clear that communication is not confined to the two levels given above. There exists one more level which is crucially important and dangerous because international communicators do not see this level and are unconscious of its existence.
This is the level of thought or thinking where concepts and notions of the human world objects and phenomena live and function. They are different in different languages as they reflect different anthropological cultures which makes international communication especially difficult.
Indeed, the problem is that words and their equivalents do reflect the human world but they give a "distorted" picture of it, the distortion caused by the level of thought where culturally determined concepts, notions, visions, images of the reflected world are presented.
This level is between the two above-mentioned ones as illustrated in fig. 2 below.
Fig. 2
World
■>■ Thought
>■ Language
I
I
I
objects, phenomena concepts, notions words, their equivalents
However, there is no straight line between the word and the reflected object of the world, it is rather a zigzag (World / Thought \ Language) and it turns a language into a distorted mirror hampering international and intercultural communication.
Interestingly, some writers and poets expressed all this in one line.
Fedor Tyutchev, an outstanding 19th century Russian poet, wrote: "A thought spoken is a lie" having squeezed the relation between language and thought into four Russian words: "Мысль изреченная есть ложь" (the same number of words in English plus the two articles which do not exist as a grammatical category in the Russian language).
One hundred years later an American writer W.S. Mervin wrote almost the same thing: "Everywhere instead of a name there is a lie! " (quoted by D. Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Third Edition, p. 384).
The contradiction between what we think and what we say, between thought and language is permanent and basic, as has been stated above.
All this becomes especially clear in case of people who are bilingual but monocultural. Of exceptional value in this regard is the information contained in Andrei Makine's book, "Le Testament français" ("The French Testament").
Andrei Makine, a Russian, was born in 1957 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, studied at Moscow State University, and emigrated to France in 1987 where he began writing novels. His fourth book, "Le Testament français", published in 1995, was the first novel in the history of French literature to win two prizes simultaneously: the most prestigious French literary award, the Goncourt prize and the Medici prize. All Makine's novels are written in French. Since childhood he has been bilingual in two languages: Russian and French that he learnt from his French grandmother.
The conflict between the reality of life in the Russian world and that in the French world expressed by the languages of the nations becomes evident from the following excerpts from this outstanding work.
Speaking about her birthplace, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Makine's grandmother, Charlotte, refers to it as a "village".
She had said it in French but we only knew Russian villages. And a village in Russia is inevitably a ring of izbas, indeed the very word in Russian, derevnya, comes from derevo — a tree, wood. The confusion persisted, despite the clarifications which Charlotte's stories would later bring. At the name of "Neuilly" we had immediate visions of the village with its wooden houses, its herd and its cockerel. And when, the following summer, Charlotte spoke to us for the first time about a certain Marcel Proust: "By the way, we used to see him playing tennis at Neuilly, on the Boulevard Bineau", we pictured the dandy with big languorous eyes (she had shown us his photo) — there among the izbas!
Beneath the fragile patina of our French words Russian reality often showed through. The President of the Republic was bound to have something Stalin-esque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks.
Thus, language is a mirror of both the external and cultural-conceptual worlds (the world of culturally dependent concepts), it reflects both of them. This mirror may be said to be distorting because, rather than an objective, impartial view of the world (which, actually, does not exist), it provides a subjective, nation-specific view filtered through the prism of a nation's spirit and mind. It would be more correct, therefore, to speak of language as a creative, even magic, rather than a distorting, mirror. Thus, the negative connotations of the word "distorting" can be avoided and the creative, formative role of language in reference to man — emphasized. After all, language does more than passively reflect everything that people obtain through their sensual, creative and cultural experience. It (language) simultaneously moulds (in continuous interaction with culture) the native speaker as a member of the given socio-cultural community by instilling and developing in him/her a system of values, morals, attitudes and behavioral patterns.
Using the widely-spread metaphor about language (or culture) picture of the world, one can say that each nation has its own cultural vision of the world as do art trends. One and the same hay stack would be seen quite differently by a realist, impressionist, cubist, or abstract artist and therefore look quite different in their reproduction of it. Language can be compared to an artist who paints from life and creates a model of it, the real-life objects having been transformed by human creative imagination.
The reflection of the world in language is the collective artistic effort of the nation speaking that language. Along with their mother tongue, each new generation is presented with a complete cultural set of already inherent in it world-view, systems of values, national character traits, and so on.
Thus, linguistic difficulties — both open and hidden — are the problems that linguists and teachers of modern languages have to resolve.
To avoid the hidden traps of lexical-phraseological collocability, the student of a foreign language should learn not only individual words and their meanings but the common and more or less fixed collocations in which these words occur in the language under study.
In order to let students have an idea of sociocultural connotations a new subject called "The world of the language under study" was introduced in Moscow State University in 1992. This subject, ideally, must be given by two parallel courses — one by a native speaker of the foreign language and another one by a representative of the student's indigenous language and culture who can see the difference in cultures.
To find a common language is a difficult task, but it can be solved if we are fully aware of pitfalls and traps on the road to peace and cooperation.
Linguists and teachers studying and teaching world languages must unite their efforts in order to shatter barriers — linguistic and cultural — separating people and peoples.
С.Г. Тер-Минасова
ВЫЗОВЫ МЕЖКУЛЬТУРНОЙ КОММУНИКАЦИИ: ВЗГЛЯД ИЗ РОССИИ
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение
высшего образования «Московский государственный университет имени М.В. Ломоносова» 119991, Москва, Ленинские горы, 1
В предлагаемой статье рассматривается чрезвычайно актуальная проблема, с которой человечество столкнулось в современную эпоху, а именно проблема межкультурной коммуникации. Она оказалась в центре научного и общественного внимания по двум основным взаимосвязанным причинам: во-первых, процессы глобализации; во-вторых, величайший прорыв в области информационных технологий, предоставивший новые возможности для свободного массового общения через Интернет.
Основные вопросы, обсуждаемые в этой работе, могут быть представлены следующим образом: 1) языковые и культурные барьеры на пути эффективной межкультурной коммуникации; 2) специфические и в то же время героические усилия найти способы межкультурной коммуникации в Советском Союзе в условиях Железного занавеса; 3) языковые и культурные трудности, препятствующие межкультурной коммуникации, вызванные как собственно лингвистическими различиями английского и русского языков, так и разницей в культурных представлениях о мире этих двух народов (разные картины мира).
Ключевые слова: язык; культура; межкультурная коммуникация; культурно-языковые различия; объем семантики; стилистические коннотации; речевой узус; сочетаемость лексических единиц; социокультурные коннотации; диалектические противоречия межкультурной коммуникации.
Cведения об авторе: Тер-Минасова Светлана Григорьевна — доктор филологических наук, профессор, президент факультета иностранных языков и регио-новедения МГУ имени М.В. Ломоносова (e-mail: president@ffl.msu.ru).
