On the possibilities and impossibilities of cross-cultural communication

Abstract

As is well known, the second half of the last century has witnessed an un­ precedented increase in cross-cultural communication at a practical level as well as a remarkable development of research on various aspects of translation as cross-cultural communication par excellence. Such an interest in the study of translation appears to be directly linked with the expansion of translational activities and reflects the impor­ tance attributed to them in the society at large. At the same time, the burgeoning growth of translation studies is to be explained within the context of the expansion of the discipline of linguistics over the past half-century , an important part of which is the development of various text-oriented branches in which attention has been given to previously largely unstudied phenomena of the functioning of language in real communicative situations.