ABSTRACT
Some of the difficulties experienced in Germany in reestablishing a unified national economy have been reported in accounts of the work of the Treuhandanstalt, the trust body charged with the transformation of ownership in former East Germany. There are two complementary viewpoints to model the process of shared understanding, when two parties meet and exchange ideas. Each of these perspectives depends on how people focus on language use. The alternative perspective focuses attention on the disparate meanings themselves. The function of language is to encode experience, an experience influenced by phenomena taking place within a particular cultural environment. Paradoxically, in some forms of collaboration a knowledge of the other’s language may not even be essential, for it is also possible for mutual understanding to arise in nonlinguistic ways. Misunderstanding when dealing with a different culture has something, but relatively little, to do with the simple translation of messages between two fixed points of meaning.
