Intercultural Communication Translational Action and Intercultural

Question: Describe about the Intercultural Communication for Translational Action and Intercultural. Answer: I must say that recent events like terrorist attack and the Bali Bombing have severely shocked the people in Australia as well as elsewhere in this globe. I have found that since this attack, people in different parts of Australia feel more insecure living with any other people who are from different cultural backgrounds. As one of the many immigrants to Australia, I have encountered several people who have shown interest in me because of my dissimilar cultural and ethnic backdrop (Asante, Miike and Yin 2013). However, it is required to mention that the ways in which all the people have reacted to my culture has been categorized in four ways. Firstly, I must say that there are some people who do not treat me as a foreigner and expect me to understand Australian culture properly. Secondly, I am from Africa and some of the Australians are open-mined and they accept me as an African and do understand the importance of understanding the intercultural difference (Buhrig, House and ten Thi je 2014). Thirdly, I must say that there are some people who have a closed mind set and are simply not bothered to accommodate any outside culture and are highly unwilling to know about the culture of a different nation. Finally, there are some groups of people who do not like to communicate with me because of my different cultural background (Carbaugh 2013). However, it is required to mention here that with this last group of people, when I tried to communicate, though, they were highly impatient with my un-Australian accent in the language and this to some extent made me skeptical about my sustainability in this nation. From my experience, I have understood that this situation is the second phase of how people from the host nation react to the foreigners. Casmir (2013) has stated in his research paper that this second phase is called ethnocentrism and here the people believe that their own culture is always better than others and they judge others by taking their own culture as the base line . In this part, focus would be shed on several intercultural dimensions of communication and these are as follows: Worldviews- procedures of thinking Cognitive procedure- ways of expressing concepts Linguistic forms- procedure of expressing ideas Behavioral patterns- ways of acting and performing Social structures- procedures of interacting Media influence- ways of channeling the messages Motivational resources- ways of deciding anything (Martin and Nakayama 2013) After discussion of this part, it can be stated that these seven dimensions have helped me to understand the intercultural communication properly. However, I must say that I have learnt that the Australians in general enjoy a good laugh and have a fairly dry sense of humor. Moreover, I saw that humor is largely used and probably the best techniques to break the ice and in some cases, I was wrong. At the time inter cultural communication, I have found that people in Africa are warmer to relationship than the people in Australia. Australian culture tends lends itself to be more egalitarian culture than my home country Africa. Mindess (2014) has stated that Australians welcome as well as embrace the migrants along with descendents of migrants from different ethnic and cultural backdrops and at the same time inspire them to maintain elements of their own culture. However, it is unfortunate to mention that despite such recent public policy of the government, difficulties of communication among people of such diverse backgrounds take place. Samovar et al. (2014), in his research paper has mentioned in his research paper that this typical communication tends to be demonstrated as cross-cultural or the intercultural communication because these two terms, from time to time are used interchangeably (Neuliep 2014). I must mention here that my experience both as a learner of English and an immigrant in Australia have stimulated my curiosity regarding different cultures. I started learning English in my middle school years, as the others in my country do. However, from my sole interest, I started communicating personally with the English speakers from the beginning of my under graduate years. My subject was English Language and Culture and my principle focus was on communicative and cultural learning than structural language learning. Help from my professors were highly helpful, as I was able to communicate with the native Australians quite easily. However, my experience was not good in all the cases and this disappointed me sometimes. Apart from that, I must say that this intercultural communication helped me to learn about different cultures and this prompted me to reflect on as well as make comparisons between my own and other cultures (Sharifian and Jamarani 2013). The second group of people with whom I met responded differently to me and this was curious enough for me. I found that some were the open-minded people who used to ask me many questions about Africa, African culture and African food habit to know my insiders viewpoint. However, it is required to mention that most of the Australians were curious about the social condition and poverty of Africa, as this comes to the news most frequently. On the other hand, I have seen some other peoples who posses stereotypes regarding Africa and judge me based on their knowledge. Some were even racists who were eager to judge me on the basis of the skin color that I possess. From my learning, I must say that this approach was demonstrated by a group of people who looked down on me because they perceive more like an Australian and African. Shuter (2012) has demonstrated that that this stereotypical categorization of other cultures prevented genuine communication. I have learnt from this position that I did not seem to be fit their stereotype image of a typical African, a person who differs from an Australian. I have already mentioned that my experience in case of inter-cultural communication was mixed and I found that after the attack of September 11, many Australians have some negative images of others of obviously different culture and ethnicity. After discussing my experience of this inter-cultural communication, I have found that many Australians reacted badly towards me, as I am from other cultural backdrop. All the Australians were talking among this regarding this September attack and they showed no interest in discussion with me (Sharifian and Jamarani 2013). On the other hand, some other Australians talked with me and were interested enough to discuss the political situation in Africa. Therefore, I can conclude that being an African, in Australia, I had a mixed experience of intercultural communication. References Asante, M.K., Miike, Y. and Yin, J., 2013.The global intercultural communication reader. Routledge. Buhrig, K., House, J. and ten Thije, J., 2014.Translational action and intercultural communication. Routledge. Carbaugh, D., 2013.Cultural communication and intercultural contact. Routledge. Casmir, F.L., 2013.Ethics in intercultural and international communication. Routledge. Martin, J.N. and Nakayama, T.K., 2013.Experiencing intercultural communication. McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Mindess, A., 2014.Reading between the signs: Intercultural communication for sign language interpreters. Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Neuliep, J.W., 2014.Intercultural communication: A contextual approach. Sage Publications. Samovar, L.A., Porter, R.E., McDaniel, E.R. and Roy, C.S., 2014.Intercultural communication: A reader. Cengage Learning. Sharifian, F. and Jamarani, M. eds., 2013.Language and intercultural communication in the new era. Routledge. Shuter, R., 2012. Intercultural new media studies: The next frontier in intercultural communication.Journal of Intercultural Communication Research,41(3), pp.219-237.