Professional Communication

Saturday, September 20, 2008 2:54 PM

Evaluating Intercultural Behaviour

Intercultural conflict often stems from miscommunication between two parties of different cultural background as they have different perceptions of objects or things. Such situation arises as individuals bring with them different verbal and non verbal practices, languages, traditions and beliefs. As such, we can attribute the cause of conflicts to cultural ignorance as people do not possess extensive cultural knowledge of others around them.

Language differences is usually the cause of misunderstandings between two parties. The incident happened while I was on holiday to Taiwan with a group of friends. On the first day on foreign soil, we were very lost and decided to seek the assistance from the hotel reception regarding the location of some tourist attractions around our hotel area. During our conversation with the receptionist, we found that it was difficult to bring our questions across even though we were communicating in Chinese because we are using different forms of the same language. Besides that, a common term to us like ‘Karaoke’, which is understood by all Singaporeans, was not understood by the receptionist. After throwing in descriptions of the term ‘Karaoke’, it was then that the receptionist exclaimed: ‘Oh! Do you all mean the KTV?’ We were left shell shocked at that point of time because KTV is not how we would perceive K-box to be normally. It was after much clarification that our group found out that both parties were referring to the same object and cleared all misunderstandings eventually.

This incident taught us a very important lesson. When we are overseas, we should be familiar with the way locals speak and their language forms to prevent any misunderstandings from occurring. We should never take anything for granted and have assumptions that we will definitely be understood. Ultimately, different nations do have their distinct languages and cultures which makes them unique from the others.


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