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A Framework for Understanding Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings

Successful communication between human beings, either within a culture or between cultures, requires that the message and meaning intended by the speaker is correctly received and interpreted by the listener. Sustainable error free communication is rare, and in most human interactions there is some degree of miscommunication.

The message sent from speaker to listener contains a wide array of features, such as words, grammar, syntax, idioms, tone of voice, emphasis, speed, emotion, and body language, and the interpretation requires the listener to attend to all of these features, while at the same time constructing an understanding of the speaker's intentions, emotions, politeness, seriousness, character, beliefs, priorities, motivations, and style of communicating. In addition, the listener must also evaluate whether the utterance is a question or a statement and how and to what extent a statement matters to the speaker (Maltz and Borker, 1982).

Each of the components of the communication provides one or more kind of information. Words convey abstract logic, tone of voice conveys attitudes, emotions and emphases, and body language communicates "requests versus commands, the stages of greeting, and turn-taking" (Schneller 1988, p. 154).

Even assuming that words and body language were perfectly understood, there is more information necessary to successfully communicate across cultures. For example, in some countries it is polite to refuse the first few offers of refreshment: "Many foreign guests have gone hungry because their U.S. host or hostess never presented a third offer" (Samovar and Porter 1988, p. 326). In understanding communication, a listener must pay attention not just to what is said and when, but also to how many times something is said, under what circumstances, and by whom. Given all this complexity, the reason human communication can often succeed is because people learn how to communicate and understand through interacting with one another throughout their lives. Therefore, it is no surprise that culture and socialization are critical determinants of communication and interpretation. "The entire inference process, from observation through categorization is a function of one's socialization" Detweiler (1975). Socialization influences how input will be received, and how perceptions will be organized conceptually and associated with memories.

Some theorists have gone so far as to claim that culture not only influences interpretation, but constitutes interpretation. The interpretation of communicative intent is not predictable on the basis of referential meaning alone. Matters of context, social presuppositions, knowledge of the world, and individual background all play an important role in interpretation (Gumperz, 1978b).

Even knowledgeable translators can have difficulty with cross-cultural translations. There may not be corresponding words or equivalent concepts in both cultures, jokes and implications may be overlooked, and literal translations can present a host of difficulties. Some language pairs are very difficult to translate, while others, usually in more similar languages, are much easier (Sechrest, Fay and Zaidi 1988).

While some of the incremental difficulties can be traced to the underlying linguistic commonalities between the languages, there may be a more elusive cultural and ecological basis for difficulty in translation. It would be interesting to test how much of the variance in communication could be accounted for by the ease with which the languages in question could be translated into one another.

Although it may facilitate cross-cultural translations, similarity of languages and cultures also increases the likelihood that communicators will erroneously assume similarity of meanings. This may make them more likely to misunderstand speech and behavior without being aware that they may have misinterpreted the speaker's message.

In general, cross-cultural miscommunication can be thought to derive from the mistaken belief that emics are etics, that words and deeds mean the same thing across cultures, and this miscalculation is perhaps more likely when cultures are similar in surface attributes but different in important underlying ways. In this case miscommunication may occur instead of non-communication.

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