Specificities of Cultural Environments Frontier in the Terminology of Intercultural Interaction

Abstract

The dis-balance between the terms describing intercultural interactions in different languages has both linguistic and historical-cultural prerequisites. The choice between the terms poly-cultural, multicultural, cross-cultural and intercultural is predetermined  mostly by the specifics of the borderlines of cultural environment.

The national specificity of the cultural frontier reflects different degrees of interpenetration of cultures in different countries and regions of the world. Accordingly, the difficulty of choosing a term is connected with the definition of the method of “land surveying” on the two sides of the cultural borderland. Often, the means of different languages reflect in different ways the equality of the participants of intercultural dialogue.

The author examines a correlation between choosing a term in different languages and the nature of intercultural interaction on a certain territory that may involve a different number of participants, and fix the presence of a culturally mixed environment. Thus, intercultural and cross-cultural options for intercultural interaction can characterize a multi-vector regional feature of cultural-linguistic communication, or dialogue.

Based on the analysis of the semantics and connotations of terms that reflect a degree of interconnection between languages and cultures, the article gives some practical advice to interpreters and translators on the appropriateness of terminological use and correspondence in language pairs.