ABSTRACT
210In this chapter: Cultures, and the intercultural competence and awareness that arise out of experience of cultures, are far more complex phenomena than it may seem to the translator who needs to know how to say “wrap-around text” in German, and the more aware the translator can become of these com plexities, including power differentials between cultures and genders, the better a translator s/he will be.
Intuitive leaps: our cultural habits almost always build an unconscious blindness to cultural difference into our “intuitions”; it is essential that we keep working at becoming aware of that blindness and the cultural differences that it obscures. That work is often sparked by the experience of loose ends, bad “fits” between our expectations and what we find in a text; pulling at those loose ends to see where they lead, what caused both them and our surprise at them, is one of the types of intuitive leaps we need to learn to make as we translate.
Pattern-building: rather than simply throwing up our hands in frustration at the difficulty of unlearning our ethnocentric habits that feel so intuitively right, we keep learning about other cultures and how to communicate more equitably with them.
Rules and theories: Intercultural Communication Studies as the Ground Zero of Translation Studies.
