Culture and the incultural knowledge and awareness helps to translator to think and act

appropriately, and to communicate and work with people from different cultural backgrounds – at
home or abroad. Intercultural competence is a valuable asset in an increasingly globalised world
where we are more likely to interact with people from different cultures and countries who have
been shaped by different values, beliefs and experiences. The main concern has traditionally been
with so-called realia, words and phrases that are so heavily and exclusively grounded in one
culture that they are almost impossible to translate into the terms — verbal or otherwise —
of another. Long debates have been held over when to paraphrase. For example: Japanese
wabi as "the flawed detail that creates an elegant whole“ Abduction – it‘s one of the problem –
we think that we understand text from different culture just because it‘s written in language, which
we understand. Sometimes we think we understand more than we actually do, because we
gloss over the differences, the areas of significant misunderstanding; sometimes we think we
understand less than we actually do, because ancient cultural hostilities and suspicions
(between men and women, adults and children, upper and lower classes, straights and gays,
majority and minority members, first-world and third-world speakers of the "same" language)
make us exaggerate the differences between us. Important thing is we do go on. We have to
trained to become ever more suspicious of our "immediate" or "intuitive" understanding of a
text to be translated, we doggedly go on believing in our ability eventually to work through
to a correct interpretation. ICC scholars are fond, for example, of tracing the steps by
which a member of one culture adapts to, or becomes acculturated into, another: denial
(isolation, separation) > defense (denigration, superiority, reversal) > minimization (physical
universalism, transcendent universalism) > acceptance (respect for behavioral difference,
respect for value difference) > adaptation (empathy, pluralism) > integration (contextual
evaluation, constructive marginality). 1 2 Ethnocentrism: the refusal to communicate across
cultural boundaries; rejection of the foreign or strange; universalization of one's own local
habits and assumptions (the anti-ideal that ICC was developed to combat) Cross-cultural
tolerance: monolinguals communicating with foreigners who speak their language; members
of different subcultures within a single national culture coming into contact and discovering
and learning to appreciate and accept their differences; problems of foreign-language learning
(unnoticed cultural differences, prosodic and paralinguistic features) and growing tolerance
for cultural and linguistic relativism (the main area of ICC concern) 3 Integration: fluency in
a foreign language and culture; the ability to adapt and acculturate and feel at home in a
foreign culture, speaking its language(s) without strain, acting and feeling (more or less) like
a native to that culture (the ICC ideal) 4 Translation/interpretation: the ability to mediate
between cultures, to explain one to another; mixed loyalties; the pushes and pulls of the
source and target cultures. ICC aims to train monoculturals to get along better in
intercultural situations; translation/interpretation studies begins where ICC leaves off, at fluent
integration. The ultimate goal of ICC is the base line of translator/interpreter training.