ABSTRACTS

• Ingrid Hanssen & Lise-Merete Alpers, Interpreters in Intercultural Health Care Settings: Health professionals’ and professional interpreters’ cultural knowledge, and their reciprocal perception and collaboration
  
• Hans Erik Näss, The Ambiguities of Intercultural Dialogue: Critical Perspectives on the European Union’s New Agenda for Culture
  
• Iris Rittenhofer, Interview without a subject: The Russian doll question and cultural encounters
  
• Penny Singh and Renitha Rampersad, Communication challenges in a multicultural learning environment
  
• Mahin Tavakoli, Javad Hatami & Warren Thorngate
  Changing Stereotypes in Iran and Canada Using Computer Mediated Communication
  
• Dexin Tian, The Hegemonic Role of the United States in the U.S.-China Copyright Disputes
  
• Mark Ward, Avatars and Sojourners: Explaining the Acculturation of Newcomers to Multiplayer Online Games as Cross-Cultural Adaptations
  

Aim: To learn how health professionals and interpreters perceive each other and collaborate. Based on this discuss the role of professional interpreters.
Method: Narrative interviews with nurses, focus group interviews and questionnaire studies of medical nurses, psychiatric health professionals, and professional interpreters.
Findings: Communication problems may be caused by language and by different horizons of understanding, medical explanations, expressions of symptoms etc. Many health professionals find it difficult to communicate well with patients through interpreters. They tend to trust professional interpreters to translate everything being said and inform about misunderstandings, while Norwegian interpreters are only authorised for verbatim translations without any additions or comments.
Conclusion: Interpreters are needed who are qualified to act as cultural mediators and who are legally and ethically authorised to do so.

Key words: Interpretation– interpreters – intercultural communication – cultural interpretation – cultural ‘bridge building’

Throughout the last couple of decades various aspects of culture seems to affect the lives of European citizens more and more. As a reply the European Union (EU) in 2007 endorsed ‘A European agenda for culture in a globalising world’, evidently their first-ever strategy for culture. Zooming in on three areas – intercultural dialogue, culture as a catalyst to creativity, and culture as part of foreign relations – culture had for the first time been elevated into the premier league of Union politics. This article therefore investigates the background and content of the agenda further with particular emphasis on intercultural dialogue: What is the substance of this phrase and under which conditions is it likely that it will affect European culture as policy instrument? Unfortunately the EU demonstrates an indistinct understanding of the notion that cultural variation consists of both diversity and difference. These two concepts are related, but not synonymous, and furthermore essential to a) understand the multicultural Europe, and b) in deciding where the attempts of intercultural dialogue should end. As a consequence it is argued that the EU must revise their understanding of intercultural dialogue if their cultural policy should become something more profound than good intentions.

Keywords: European Union, cultural policy, globalization, intercultural dialogue

This article contributes to the rethinking of qualitative interview research into intercultural issues. It suggests that the application of poststructuralist thought should not be limited to the analysis of the interview material itself, but incorporate the choice of interviewees and the modalities for the accomplishment of interviews. The paper focuses on a discussion of theoretical and methodological considerations of design, approach and research strategy. These discussions are specified in relation to a project on gender and ethnicity in cultural encounters at Universities. In the paper, I introduce a research design named Cultural interviewing, present an approach to the design of interviews named Interview without a subject, and offer an analytic strategy directed towards the analysis of interview transcripts named Interview on the level of the signifier. The paper concludes that even though it is relevant for research into intercultural issues to focus on gender and ethnicity, it has to de-center both, gender and ethnicity.

Keywords: cultural encounters, qualitative interview, poststructuralism, ethnicity, gender

Culture is an intricate concept, with many different classifications. Simply put, "culture" refers to a group or community with which we share common experiences that shape the way we understand the world. Each of us is shaped by many factors, and culture is one of the powerful forces that influence our lives.

This paper offers a critique of problems experienced in multicultural learning environments and explores factors that inhibit intercultural communication. In addition, this paper highlights current psychological and cultural issues which are relevant to contemporary life in South Africa.

Keywords: culture, communication, learning, multiculturalism.

As part of a university course activity, one group of Canadian and one group of Iranian students were randomly partnered to exchange e-mail messages via the Internet for seven weeks. Before beginning their correspondence, all students completed a questionnaire measuring their stereotypes, attitudes, and knowledge about the people and culture of their prospective e-pals. Students from both countries then exchanged messages and photos. In addition, students within each country met with one another to discuss their e-pal exchanges each week. At the end of seven weeks of e-mail exchange, all students again completed the original questionnaire. Pre-posttest changes in attitude, stereotypes, and knowledge about the culture of e-pals show that attitudes of participants towards people from the other country became more favourable, even though their judgments of the similarities between two cultures remained unchanged. Negative stereotypes changed towards more realistic ones. Attitude change was affected by the quality, topic, and frequency of e-mail exchange. Knowledge of participants about different aspects of the other culture became more complex and realistic over time. However, for many aspects of each culture, there was no consistent relationship between raising the level of knowledge and a change in attitude.

Key words: Intercultural communication, computer mediated communication (CMC), Iran and Canada, attitude change, stereotype change, intercultural understanding, e-pals, pen-pals.

This paper examines the U.S. hegemonic role in imposing its copyright standards onto the Chinese, who hold fundamentally different cultural perceptions of copyright in terms of innovation, fair use, and the public domain. A thematic analysis of the transcripts of 45 in-depth interviews of the Chinese copyright holders and consumers via the theoretical lens of hegemony reveals the following. To obtain bigger market access and better protection of its intellectual property rights (IPR), the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has been coercive in universalizing its IPR standards and policies by establishing an internal interagency mechanism and an external network. The study suggests that both the United States and China need to adopt the golden mean to realize the goals of its respective copyright laws.

Keywords: hegemonic role; cultural perceptions; innovation; fair use; the public domain

Only in recent years have formal theories of immigrant and sojourner acculturation been developed. Could these theories be employed to study the acculturation of newcomers into the virtual cultures of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs)? These gameworlds are inhabited by millions of people worldwide and have emerged as societies with their own cultural myths, schemata, argot, and communication practices. As such, new players may be viewed as sojourners who employ communication to acculturate themselves into the society of the gameworld, accommodate the cultural Others they encounter, and negotiate viable identities. After reviewing theories of cross-cultural adaptation—including Nishida’s schema theory and Kim’s integrative theory—and what they predict regarding the intercultural communication strategies of sojourners, this article shows how game studies research confirms that new MMOG players deploy communication in the predicted manner to achieve acculturation.

Keywords: cross-cultural adaptation, immigrant acculturation, identity negotiation and management, intercultural communication, schema theory, massively multiplayer online games