LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Language is the principal instrument through which we lead our social lives and it is closely intertwined with culture in various and complex ways. But what is culture? We often hear this term and tend to take its meaning for granted. When we think of culture, we think first of all, of a set of beliefs, values, traditions, practices, customs, shared by a social community and perpetuated by its members through the centuries. As Claire Kramsch claims in her work Language and Culture:
People who identify themselves as members of a social group [...] acquire common ways of viewing the world through their interactions with other members of the same group. These views are reinforced through institutions like the family, the school, the workplace, the church, the government, and other sites of socialization throughout their lives. [...] Language is not a culture-free code, distinct from the way people think and behave, but rather, it plays a major role in the perpetuation of culture, particularly in its printed form.
As members of a specific social and discourse community we have acquired and developed over the years a way of thinking, perceiving, imagining, believing and acting which inevitably expresses and embodies our cultural identity. But what happens when our way of viewing reality clashes with another world-vision? What happens when we meet people speaking a different language and sharing a different culture? Is there the possibility of a mutual understanding even if "we cut up reality and categorize experience" in different manners? Does language determine our thought and our conceptual system? Do we risk remaining imprisoned in the trap of "linguistic relativism"?
According to the anthropologist Edward Sapir:
No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. [...] We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
Sapir's hypothesis can be regarded valid up to a certain extent. Yes, our mental grammar shapes our ideas, but no, it does not prevent us from understanding speakers belonging to speech communities different from ours. Cross-cultural communication is undoubtedly more difficult, since it requires the grammatical knowledge of a foreign language and the familiarity with different frames or schemata. Beyond the semantic meaning of an individual's words, we also have to take into account the pragmatic context in which the utterance occurs, in other words we have to pay attention to the contextualization cues, verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal signs which allow us to produce correct inferences about the cultural background and the social expectations assumed by speakers during the communicative exchange.
That is why, it is so difficult sometimes to translate from a source language into a target one. The aim of translators, in fact, is not simply to render the literal or denotative meaning of words but to convey their connotative and cultural nuances. A translator must always be aware of the similarities and differences between his/her mother-tongue and the target language. S/he must also learn to interpret what lies behind the surface-meaning of a text. The meaning of a text must not be reduced to the sense of its individual words but it must also be sought in what a text aims to achieve.
USEFUL LINKS
Further reflections about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis