Communication barriers becomes more common problem within nowadays organisations as there is getting more and more international chains such as hotels, companies around the world, international trade always occurs between different countries, and many organisations’ work environment becomes more multicultural. Eubanks et al. (Samovar & Porter, 2010, p.137) illustrated that ‘cross-cultural or intercultural communication is between individuals and groups whose perceptions and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter communication event’. This assignment discusses what the potential communication barriers across cultures could be and what the solutions are to overcome these cultural challenges.
Robbins et al. (2011) indicated that language could be the most common problem in cross-cultural communication, even people use same language could have communication problem because of different age and context groups could use words differently. Except language differences, problems relates to language difficulties, could be semantics, word connotations and tone differences. Semantics could cause communication barrier as there could be some uncommon words within different languages that might be difficult to translate, for instance, there is no direct Russian equivalents for the English terms – efficiency, free market and regulation.
Connotations could be another reason to result in language difficulties. Individuals from various nations could imply words differently that incur misunderstanding or confusion. such as for Chinese people, to emphasize the importance of customer service, satisfying customer’s needs and setting highest goal for customers, Chinese enterprise management always train staff to regard customer as God (Han & Sun, 2011), and there is a Chinese saying that says‘customer is God’, western people might be confusing with what the relationship could be