A moment's pauce to think or cursory
look at ralated reference books could
give us many ideas of what make cross-
cultural communication difficult to
achieve, but what interests me most is,
the fact contributes to difficulties of
cross-culturalcommunication that we human
beings cotegorize what surrounds us accord-
ing to cultures we belong to.
For instance, thanks to the popularity
of Cognitive Linguistics, the fact has
been becoming increasingly famous that
there is a tribe of which language has
surprisingly only two terms for colors,
namely, white and black. If we want to
translate red, blue, green, yellow and the
like into the above language, what should
we do? But this fact―the tribe has only
two color terms―does not mean that they
cannnot perceive colors other than black
and white, of which validity has been
checked against a series of preceding
experiments.
When we want to tlanslate more abstract
terms, things will argurably be more
complicated. A seemingly very simple
translation as the above entails such
difficulty, then just imaging things
overwhelms me.
