In the century of knowledge and technology, the importance of intercultural communication is inevitable. Many Scientists and researchers emphasize in the importance of international communication in today's life. Fast travel, internet and international media, made it easy for us to communicate with people all over the world. In the century of globalization, humans as social beings need to interact with each other for survival. Today many problems that the world confronted with have a global nature. The world challenges with problems such as: poverty, international terrorism, immigration, global warming, and destruction of nature which needs the cooperation between nations. International communication is not an option or selective choice but a necessity.
Nowadays, one of the main questions among citizens of nations is, whether the communication between different nations is effective or not. Individuals try to improve their communication skills by dealing with the people of other cultures. Individuals with intercultural competence can be more successful in their career, education and daily life. The importance of this need appears particularly when we travel or migrate to another country for specific purposes such as studying or business. It is necessary to learn the target culture to communicate with the people who have different backgrounds. The number of people who interact in different languages and cultures is growing fast. This communication appears for variety purposes, business, education, health, military cooperation, etc. In such communications we need to be aware without misunderstanding. Studying on the nature of linguistic and cultural similarities and differences can play a positive and constructive role.
The intercultural communication can apply in many fields such as education, management, marketing and advertisement. In an international business the intercultural communication competence is a very important factor because many company managers need to know how to run their firms, manage staff and communicate with customers. Intercultural communication knowledge has an utmost effect in other fields such as education, health care and other public affaires because of growing multicultural populations.
Definition of intercultural communication:
Intercultural communication is fields of research which tries to find out how people from different countries and cultures behave, interact and perceive the world around them. The findings of such research are applied to real life or authentic situations, how to combine different people from different cultures within an environment is a very important factor in this field.
In the definition of intercultural communication we need to contribute other scientific fields such as: anthropology, psychology and communication.
There are different definitions for intercultural communication. For example, "Intercultural communication can be defined as the interpersonal interaction between members of different groups, which differ from each other in respect of the knowledge shared by their members and in respect of their linguistic forms of symbolic behavior."(Karlfried Knapp, 1987)
"The term ' intercultural communication' refers to communicate between people from different cultures( Dodd, 1998; Ting Toomey, 1999) also refers to symbolic exchange processes whereby individuals from two or more different cultural communities negotiate shared meaning in an interactive situation".( Ting Toomey)
Because of different cultural backgrounds, when two or more people attempt to communicate, a lot of cultural barriers often arise due to the differences in their ways of life, social styles, customs, world views, religions, philosophy and so on.
"The overall internal capacity of an individual to manage key challenging features of intercultural communication to efficiently negotiate a mode of communication and interaction." (Kim, 1991)
Successful communication doesn't simply acquire a language, but different cultural values reflected in the language as well.
Marsen(2006) believes that international communication tends to describe the relations between members of different ethnic groups and languages, interacting in an international context such as the united nations or in a context where one culture is dominant such as in societies with minority migrant groups.
Intercultural communication is sharing the information and knowledge among people with different cultural backgrounds and with different levels of awareness; this differences include both national- cultural differences and professional /social differences.
Why intercultural competence is important?
Nowadays the population of the world especially in Europe, Asia, America are growing fast. There are a lot of multicultural countries and because of the advance of technology we can see different people from different culture in every country. Also we can see more international students in advanced countries or more people from different nationalities in business fields, so in spite of these facts the intercultural competences has an important meaning in these societies.
Economical, political, commercial are the fields that we must increase our intercultural competence in order to get best results.
Because of the rapid advance of communication technology through media, people can communicate easily with each other, so here again the intercultural competence has a significant effect.
In conlusion, the debates about intercultural communication are not new. In order to communicate effectively we need a wide level of empathy and awareness about the principles and rules of other cultures. Intercultural communication involves techniques for facilitating communication among different cultures.
Subject: The intercultural communication 
Fri Apr 18, 2014 10:08 pm
