Page 49 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

34 Reading Between the Signs

“We covered 3,200 miles in four days.” “Americans travel prima-
rily for the vicarious pleasure of spending one’s time on the open
road, deriving satisfaction from moving through space and from
exploring the sights as they may present themselves at random to
the motorist” (73). “The French feel that the future is a realm of
flux and uncertainty” and look to their guidebooks to provide them
with a way of “imposing one’s will on the unknown” (63).
Just as a travel guidebook or other cultural artifact may exem-
plify two different perspectives on the world, similar words may
convey different meanings across languages, especially those re-
lated to value-laden concepts. In An Introduction to Intercultural
Communication the authors offer the example of marriage:
An excellent study among Americans, French, and Japa-
nese conducted by a trilingual scholar revealed quite
different reactions to the word “marriage” and its equiva-
lents in French (mariage) and in Japanese (kekkon). For
the Americans marriage was associated with equality
and sharing, togetherness, and love. For the French,
sexuality and passion were highly salient, confirming
some stereotypes, no doubt. For the Japanese, we find
family and children at the heart, with a strong pessi-
mistic undertone of obligations and “the end of the line.”
(Condon and Yousef 188)

Value Orientations: The Kluckhohn-Strodtbeck Model
No culture is made up of robots who uniformly respond to identi-
cal programming. Yet even though all societies contain compet-
ing values and alternative responses, it is still possible to make
some generalizations regarding the overarching tendencies of the
majority. One way of organizing such major value orientations
was devised by Florence R. Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck
(1961) and consists of a series of continua on which a culture’s
way of relating to fundamental value orientations can be plotted.
For example, all societies have a basic attitude toward the way
people relate to nature. The Kluckhohn-Strodtbeck continuum
shows three alternatives:

people control people in harmony nature controls
nature with nature people

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