Conducting Business Across Borders

Book excerpt: Most misunderstandings boil down to language—how we use words and how we say them. If this is true within our own language, when we communicate across cultures the problem becomes far more critical. However, because we know we are of different cultures, we tend to blame misunderstandings on differences in culture, ignoring the fact that we may simply have misinterpreted what the other person has said to us, or we may not have been clear in what we said to that person. This book provides suggestions for how to communicate in English with non-native speakers and aims to minimize such misunderstandings. The communication process is analyzed from the non-native perspective and should help readers understand the difficulties and frustrations that non-natives encounter in their communications with native speakers.