… And What Happens There
Nowadays establishing and developing international and intercultural links has become a most urgent problem for the world's community. It is especially urgent and topical for Russia which always stood apart from the main roads of the Western world and during the Soviet period for some time was almost completely isolated from it by the Iron Curtain.
The sudden drastic change of the situation in this country, naturally, has caused a whirl of new problems. At the same time it has helped to realize that the language barrier is not the last one in communication between different peoples and that behind it the cultural barrier is looming large. Indeed, when communication with foreigners was prohibited, dangerous or just impossible its cultural aspects were unseen. Now they are in the centre of public and scholarly attention.
Every meeting with a foreigner, every lesson of a foreign language, every work of foreign literature is a crossroads of cultures because the very concept of "foreignness" implies an opposition to the native language, literature, mode of living, mentality, etc. A clash or, putting it mildly, a dialogue of cultures accompanies every movement beyond the usual circle and hampers communication.
The actual communication with foreigners naturally gives most obvious and vivid examples of clashes of cultures of all kinds - from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the comic to the tragic.
A little boy from Chernobyl was adopted by an Italian family. In the middle of the night a telephone call woke up the man on duty in the Ukrainian embassy. An excited woman's voice asked the man to come immediately: "the boy won't go to bed, screams, does not let neighbours sleep, etc." When the embassy people arrived, the poor boy explained crying: "I want to go to bed, I am so sleepy and they make me put on a suit to go somewhere." The problem with the boy was that in his culture there were no pajamas, no nightdress, and going to bed implied taking off clothes, not putting anything on.
Thai students of Russian literature stopped attending lectures. "The teacher shouts at us", they said. The unfortunate teacher was speaking the way which is thought appropriate in the Russian culture: clearly and loudly. This manner turned out to be unacceptable for students from Thailand because they were accustomed to some different parameters of timbre, pitch, loudness, etc.
Reading foreign literature is a conflict of cultures, every work of foreign literature is a crossroads of cultures because the reader sees and appreciates an alien world through the prism of his/her own culture.
Only one example. An American anthropologist told the story of Hamlet to people from a West African tribe. All their reactions were "wrong" from the point of view of European cultures. For instance, when they heard that Claudius married his brother's widow only about a month after the funeral their reaction was: "He did well", the old man beamed and announced to the others, "I told you that if we knew more about Europeans, we would find they really were very like us."*
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Laura Bohannan. Shakespeare in the Bush. Applying Cultural Anthropology. Ed. by Aaron Podolefsky, Peter J.Brown. Mayfield Publishing Company, MountainView, California, p.38. |
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Another very widely spread kind of interaction of cultures is (surprise, surprise!) learning a foreign language. Indeed, having learnt a word from another language, you intrude a culturally different and alien world because beyond this word there is a concept of the object or phenomenon which the word denotes, and this concept is determined by a different culture. Thus, even "equivalent" words of different languages are underlain by different concepts, different cultures, and different worlds. In other words, even if objects and phenomena coincide on the level of reality, our ideas, concepts about them are different because they are determined by different cultures, different modes of living, different customs, beliefs, visions of the world.
Every lesson of a foreign language is a crossroads of cultures, every learner of a foreign language intrudes an alien world and when in Rome must see the world as Romans do.
Filling in a simplest form in English is a great cultural problem for Russians.
First name, last name looks very simple for speakers of English, but the very fact that it is the same word name is confusing because in Russian, like in many other languages, these are just two different words: familia (last name), imya (first name). The word order in Russian is not rigid like in English, so it is not easy to decide which is "first" and which is "last", especially as in official Russian documents "last name" comes first.
The word nationality is still more difficult because it even sounds very much like the Russian word nationalnost. However, the Russian word means the ethnic belonging to a certain nation while nationality in official forms means only citizenship. So ethnic Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians, etc. from Russia invariably make this mistake and do not understand (sometimes refuse aggressively nowadays) why they should write: Russian.
Then comes another culturally difficult word address which sounds and looks like the Russian word adres. A colleague of mine, a professional teacher of English was very upset when she realized that she could not fill in the simplest blank saying address because after this there came city/country. "What on earth do they mean by city/country? I have written the address", - she asked desperately.
It was a normal reaction of a speaker of Russian where an address not only includes city and country but actually begins with them because it is written in a reverse order as compared with the English Language. So the colleague had written her address in the Russian way and was puzzled by the sudden question of "city/country". This kind of linguistic failure was obviously caused by a lack of knowledge of some cultural facts. Thus, words of different languages which seem to refer to the same object or phenomenon can hardly ever be actual "equivalents" in the full sense of the word.
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| Svetlana Ter-Minasova |
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