Page 114 - Cyberculture and New Media

Rita Zaltsman 105
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is a ‘language barrier’. It takes some time to understand an
individual’s personality through the written word and some
people can come off as curt or uncaring or downright rude
without meaning to.

This argument turns out to be debatable: some participants consider
such characteristics as speech tempo, dialect, humour perception across
cultures, or non-verbal signals to be more relevant for efficient
communication. In their view, it is predominantly false pronunciation and an
accent that considerably determine its quality.
Gradually, the community proceeds to discussing the pitfalls in
intercultural communication caused by latent meanings within the same
language. The major issue is whether the initial message coincides with the
decoded information or not:

... once at school we were playing Chinese whispers and
half of us were Arab and the other half Europeans... the
meanings got totally distorted across the cultures!!! in this
case, we were teenagers and the Europeans would say some
daring word and the Arabs would hear it as something very
neutral!

Some participants suppose that they would have experienced greater
psychological comfort if the seminar had been conducted in their native
language:

... I say in all sincerity that I would like to write and
participate more in this seminar if I write either in Swedish
or Spanish. Sometimes I don’t find the right expressions to
explain in English and it’s a bit frustrated. But I hope that
such a seminars on internet like this one can be given in our
mother tongues in the very near future.

In general, however, the students appreciate the choice of English as
a communication lingua franca:

I think it’s easier if the groupmembers have the same
language, because you don’t have to work with the
language at all and you understand everything, it’s easy
then.

On the whole, the level of language proficiency of non-native
English speakers (representatives of Eastern cultures) has been compatible