Intercultural professional communication: Approaches and issues

As a result of globalization and the internalization of trade and information, intercultural communication has become an increasingly significant topic. This is especially the case in professional communication, because participants in professional communication have to draw on more sophisticated and transdisciplinary frameworks in order to get their jobs done. Even the communication among professional peers themselves is far from smooth and straightforward, and is mediated by participants from different cultural backgrounds with different assumptions. As Gottis (2004, 10) notes in an introduction to a monograph on intercultural professional communication, 'domain-specific languages are prone to the pressures of intercultural variation, as it is not only the sociocultural factors inherent in a text but also the interpretive schemata which deeply affect its realization and interpretation within the host community . . . intercultural communication is often made more complex by the locutors' need to make their texts as adaptable as possible to contextual features and pragmatic purpose'. The use of a 'lingua franca', i.e. English, does not make the issue less complicated; instead, it can even be argued that the use of a language that is not the native language of both the speaker and the hearer can create more problems in the construction, use and interpretation of texts.