ABSTRACT
As discussed in Chapter 7, misunderstanding in intercultural communication can arise for a variety of reasons. In this chapter, we are going to look at what we can do to facilitate successful communication in intercultural encounters. We will fi rst discuss Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), which aims to understand what people do naturally when there are communicative and linguistic differences between conversation participants. We will then discuss strategies of collaboratively negotiating meaning and achieving understanding, followed by a section on interpreter-mediated interactions. In the last section, we will explore how knowledge of professional and institutional discourse can contribute to successful communication.
