Cultural Anchors in a State of Flux: the Case of Brexit

Formal institutions such as laws and regulations, enacted and administered by statutory bodies can be changed overnight. However, that degree of volatility hardly applies to informal institutions, namely traditions, beliefs, national culture values and related behaviour, deeply engrained in social consciousness. Brexit brings about new regulations of international trade and business that cause operational disturbances to international business participants so far as the British market and counterparts are involved. In such a state of flux, business people might find some stability and comfort in the established societal-level values of the United Kingdom and respectively, in the mitigating role of intercultural competence. The paper attempts to reveal the underlying cultural values at a country-level of the United Kingdom and discuss their implications for international business participants. It is a conceptual desk research drawing on contributions of renowned crosscultural communication scholars. The merits of the paper lie with its broad applicability, subject to further contextualization on behalf of international business agents.

SEMANTIC SPECIFICITY OF ADJECTIVES DENOTING A SUCCESSFUL PERSON /THING IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN

Comparative studies fascinate scholars working in various branches of human activity. In linguistics, onlycomparison helps find out both common and distinctive features of the languages and trace their interconnections as well as specificity. The present paper deals with the comparative research of two distantly related languages - English and Ukrainian - on the material of adjectives denoting a successful person/thing. The topic in question is relevant and contributes to further studies of lexical and comparative semantics, cross-language and crosscultural communication, lexicography, etc. The adjectives in question occupy significant places in the vocabulary of the languages under study. The concept of success belongs to basic social and cultural values and is studied in philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics and other sciences. Having introduced the methodology of formalized analysis of lexical semantics, one of the requirements of which is a formal criterion – belonging of the lexical units to one part of speech – the author of this paper collected, analyzed and classified the obtained language material from lexicographical sources. Depending on the degree of polysemy, three groups in English and two in Ukrainian have been formed. Each of them possesses its own features alongside with their common characteristics. Comparative research of the definite fragment of lexis resulted in in-depth analysis of its system and structural organization, semantic specificity, both common and distinctive featuresas well as its representation in corresponding language and culture bearers’ consciousness.

PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATING SLOGANS CONSIDERING THE ASPECT OF CROSSCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

The article tackles the problem of finding translation matches in order to render the idea and save the emotional content of the source advertisement text in the target text, thus preserving its preciseness. It also highlights the aspect of cross-cultural communication involved, which requires on part of its participants realizing inevitable cultural differences and overcoming cultural barriers to achieve mutual understanding and respect. With globalization of all spheres of life it is natural to assume that we are becoming part of world web media which will contribute to forming new thought patterns mainly because more and more bilingual people use English as a second language. Now that this tendency is overwhelming, we can look at the problem of translation anew. Effective cross-cultural communication takes place under the condition that all the communicants possess certain similar thought patterns. If communicants have different thought patterns, it can cause misunderstanding and cross-cultural conflict. So, the mediators in cross-cultural communication have to be not only bi-lingual, but also bi-cultural. The effectiveness of cross-cultural communication can be achieved via equivalent thought and speech patterns. With translation of advertisement texts the principle of dynamic equivalence helps to obtain the most adequate translation where the unity of the form and the content is preserved with the help of text adaptation. The target text creates a certain final effect, which determines the set of lexical, grammatical and stylistic units of the translation language with the translator’s imagination. The article also gives examples of translation of advertising texts that were marked as the best at various advertising festivals. The dynamic development of media linguistics contributes to the research in the sphere of translation of advertising texts.

Problems of cognitive distortions in cross-cultural communication when using automatic translation in the Russian Chinese dialogue

The article is aimed at analyzing cognitive distortions in crosscultural communication when using automatic translation from Chinese to Russian, which are presented in the Internet space. Hypothesis: cognitive impairment in cross-cultural communication when automatic ChineseRussian translation due to differences in mentality of Russian and Chinese, differential specificity of cognitive picture of the world at native speakers of languages of different structures, especially the inclusion of the components in the scope of the concept, specifics of the representation of the material with different system of graphics, the mismatches of structure of Russian and Chinese proposals, etc. A special role is played by the peculiarities of the tradition of teaching and communication in Russia and China, as well as the specifics of ethnolinguopsychology. The Chinese mentality has a priority influence on the formation of respect for traditions and following them in the written style of speech. The Chinese mentality finds Parallels with the North Caucasian mentality in using the cognitive experience of its predecessors, in following the traditions of pedagogical practice. Russian Russian and Chinese Russian specialists ’ practical skills in cross-cultural communication correspond to the goals, stages, and tasks of training specialists in Russian-Chinese dialogue. The method of analysis is based on an axiological approach and synergetics, including methods of ethnopsycholinguistics, cross-cultural communication, machine learning, methods of teaching languages as foreign languages in an ethno-cultural environment with significant differences in social distance.

A visual and narrative dialogue on our collective past, present and future

A World Family Portrait is a joint project of the Consortium for Comparative Research on Regional Integration and Social Cohesion (RISC) and Regions and Cohesion. It aims to promote interdisciplinary and crosscultural communication through images and essays on the different faces of humanity, including, but not limited to, our similarities and our differences, our strengths and our weaknesses, our hopes and our concerns, our legacies and our aspirations, as well as our interactions with each other and our world. This project seeks to establish a dialogue between human experiences, academic reflections and shared ethics, such as mutual respect, the protection of human dignity and solidarity.

THE STUDENTS’ ENGLISH PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE IN UNDERSTANDING CROSSCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A STUDY AT XI GRADE STUDENT OF SMK NEGERI 1 BATULAYAR

This paper investigates the students’ English pragmatic competence in understanding crossculturalcommunication. There were eighteen communicative situations designed in threedifferent speech acts namely; handling complaint, request and refusal. The situationspresented were very similar to the authentic situation that students found during the joborientation for six months in tourism industry. Three instruments were used in collecting thedata; questionnaires, discourse completion tests (DCTs) and interview. The multiple choicequestionnaire was used to investigate the students’ pragmatic understanding in three deferentspeech acts. Meanwhile DCTs was used to investigate the students’ pragmatic knowledge ingiving response to the given situations related to three different speech acts. Interviewquestion was used to clarify the missing information and to strengthen the reason why suchresponses were given in questionnaire and in DCTs. The sample of this study was 92 XIGrade students from Hotel Accommodation Program (AP) at SMK Negeri 1 Batulayar. Theresult show that the students ability in understanding pragmatic is considered very low, theyonly can understand the utterance from the literal meaning of words and phrases, but theimplied meaning of some particular utterances were uneasy to deal with. It is seen from thereported data that the average of the students’ responses in understanding pragmatics of thethree different speech acts is only 12.7%. The second three different speech acts in discoursecompletion test (DCTs) was also about giving response to the complaint, request and refusal.DCTs were used to investigate the students’ ability in using their pragmatic knowledge toresponse the nine situational communicative designed. The finding show that the students’ability in giving the written response were vary and less impressive. The written responsesin three different speech acts prompt were potentially led to a pragmatic inability inmaintaining the smooth conversation in various situations.