Intercultural Communication, Mindful Translation and Squeezing “Culture” onto the Screen

1. Intercultural Communication Audiovisual translation (AVT), as many have noted (see Gambier in this issue) has moved from its focus on the text to a more multimodal, multi-semiotic perspective. Along with this has come the interest in the cultural factor in AVT. However, the research on how to account for cultural difference in AVT has mainly focused on the translation of culture-bound terms, which, as we will see, are just the tip of the iceberg in intercultural communication (ICC). According to Rogers et al. (2002), ICC was first coined by E. T. Hall (1990) in 1959. Hall was working with Native Navaho Indians on a US government land project, and noticed in the negotiations between the government officials and the Navaho, that even though English was the lingua franca, misunderstanding over meaning was creating serious practical problems. What was particularly notable about Hall’s work was his ability to identify the differences as patterns, which are as he stressed, shared “out of awareness” within cultural groups. ICC has grown enormously since then, though Hall himself was little involved in theorising about the discipline. Milton Bennett, an American ICC consultant, one of the founder developers of the discipline, posits that «the intercultural communication approach is that cultures are different in their languages, behaviour patterns, and values» (1998: 3). Much of the work on the cultural in translation is, however, based on monocultural communication. The assumption is often that culture is a superficial difference, that underneath there are universal similarities (Katan 2004: 333-4), that once ethnographic knowledge is made available and the «original context is reactivated alongside the target context» (House 2006: 356; 2009: 12) then communication will in theory be successful. Reddy (1979: 297) labelled this monocultural approach to translation the “conduit” metaphor: once the language is “translated”, then meaning is successfully communicated in the same way as conduits transfer without loss or distortion. However, it is now accepted that meaning is not innate, nor is it simply relayed by language. Instead, language is a cue to what it is that is going on below the tip of the iceberg.