LANGUAGE, POWER, TRANSLATION AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Cultural models (or culturally shared attitudes) are rooted in people’s ideas about the world they live in. Although potentially transmittable in a variety of ways, cultural models are mainly passed on via language. The linguistic transmission of culture may take overt forms (proverbs, myths, legends) or covert ones (through daily communicative interaction), both linked to the core notion of reality – which is neither absolute nor abstract, but experienced “within familiar contexts of social behaviour and cultural meanings.” (Bonvillain 2003: 47)