Cultural gaps in linguistic communication with reference to english and arabic language communities

Abstract EN

Since each culture has its own unique identity, there is often a problem of communication gaps.

Cultural communication gaps are crucial issues that influence all types of communication all over the world.

These gaps are often the underlying reason for major misunderstandings or misinterpretations among the members of different cultural communities.

The first aim of this paper is to examine some of the problems that are caused by cultural differences on the basis of linguistic communication, i.e., the verbal means of contact between the source language culture and target language culture.

The analysis in this study will be limited to English as a representative of the source language culture (SL) and Arabic as the target language one (TL).

The second aim of the study is to suggest some methods for dealing with the problems of cross cultural communication such as understanding the source language culture from various perspectives in order to find a suitable equivalent meaning in the target language.

Knowing the shared linguistic features in the language of the two cultures will help to avoid many misinterpretation problems.

Adding explanatory foot notes in the case of some cultural items that cannot be easily translated will be also of great assistance in this direction.

Then paper is divided into four sections.

Section one deals with the meaning of culture and communication.

Cultural gaps and problems of misinterpretation with some solutions are explained in section two.

Section three focuses on the main problems of cultural gaps in linguistic communication and offers some solutions to them.

Finally, section four is the conclusion which summarizes the major findings of this study.