Page 76 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

Selected Topics in Intercultural Communication 61

the ancient writings of the holy prophets and talks of fate, you
might get up, disgusted, and leave, wondering how in the world
this speaker thought she could convince anyone of anything.
If we are determined, we can manage to achieve some objec-
tive insight into the way our culture handles group membership,
information sharing, and time, but the topic we are now consider-
ing is much harder to see with a dispassionate eye. It covers the
way we think, how we organize our thoughts, what we trust as
evidence, and how we try to persuade others.
An enlightening discussion of this topic can be found in the
chapter “Thinking about Thinking” in John C. Condon and Fathi
Yousef’s An Introduction to Intercultural Communication. These
authors characterize cultural rhetoric as “acquired habits, widely
shared by speakers within a particular society, influencing both
the speaker and his own cultural audience and extremely difficult
to translate satisfactorily into another society…without some loss
or awkwardness” (emphasis added) (235–36). Clearly, for inter-
preters working between any two languages, one of the major
challenges will not only be to find equivalent words, phrases, and
idioms, but also to present them in a familiar structure and in a
convincing manner.

Organizing Information
Of course, each language has its little quirks in the way it orga-
nizes information. Condon and Yousef cite as an example the
numerous ways American English uses patterns of threes to de-
scribe things, as in the following phrases: “tall, dark and hand-
some,” “wine, women and song,” “hook, line and sinker.” We
break things down into a beginning, middle, and end, and we
award three basic college degrees. Many children’s stories follow
this pattern as well: “Three Blind Mice,” “The Three Little Pigs,”
“Three Billy Goats Gruff.” We tell people, “If at first you don’t suc-
ceed, try, try again” and “Third time’s a charm,” and many of our
jokes end with the punch line, “And then the third guy says…”
and so on.
Since reality doesn’t really come in threes, it is possible that
as Condon and Yousef suggest, “...our culturally influenced rhe-
torical forms themselves help shape our worldview, our thoughts,
and our actions” (233). We can see this in ourselves: in writing a
sentence we come up with two adjectives and then feel compelled
to find a third one to make it feel right.

03 MINDESS PMKR 61 10/18/04, 11:23 AM