This article examines interpreters' dilemmas and choices in the case of home-based aged care assessments of elderly migrants in Australia. Based on one-on-one interviews with professional interpreters, it specifically explores tensions between power, norms and interpreters' own positionings on intercultural communication problems. Data analysis…

As part of its ambitious Belt and Road initiative, the Chinese government, cognizant of the fact that establishing strong people-to-people bonds locally, regionally, and internationally will be key to the initiative's success and that languages will play a pivotal role in facilitating this, has called for the diversification of language programmes…

Extensive research has been done to identify the conceptual components of intercultural competence (IC), which resulted in a plethora of models and a wide array of differently defined constructs that are in use today to develop and assess IC. However, the majority of IC research comes from relatively similar contexts that are westernised, high on…

Regular and sustained contact with speakers of other languages might offer members of multilingual societies opportunities to develop cultural awareness through interactions with diverse individuals. This study examines how the language awareness of individuals in a highly multilingual setting can act as a resource to support their learning about…

The following article attempts to characterise the current changes in the communication of people living in the area of Polish-Czech borderland based on the results of the study conducted in 2018 and 2019. The aim is to determine the dominant mode of supranational communication, as well as the reason behind its prevalence by analysing the language…

In most service activities, customer satisfaction depends largely on the direct interaction with service providers. In the case of tourism, this interaction often occurs between people from different countries and whose mother tongues are different. In this context, concepts such as cultural proximity, linguistic accommodation, expectations and…

The goal of this article is to examine intercultural experiences and the cultural identity reconstruction of Chinese international students in Germany by focusing on their cultural learning, and use of multiple languages including English as a lingua franca (ELF), German and Chinese. Three rounds of individual interviews over 1 year were conducted…

This paper examines how intercultural communication (ICC) and the notion of culture are framed in on-line promotional discourse of higher education (HE) ICC courses. It analyses a specialised corpus comprised of 14,842 words from 43 course websites of master's programmes in ICC in the UK and the US--internationally, the two largest providers of…

Recent research has shown that increasing the number of international students and staff in universities does not necessarily make the campus more "international". Ladegaard and Cheng (2014) found that local and non-local students live completely separate lives on campus and do not work together, let alone socialise, unless forced to do…

Internationalising higher education (HE) shows tensions between recruiting international students as a means of securing income and meeting their particular educational needs towards practices of caring for their social, psychological, intercultural and educational well-being. This paper briefly outlines the extent of current HE…

According to a recent report, the top skill that employers are looking for in graduates is an ability to work collaboratively with teams of people from a range of backgrounds and countries. So as universities seek to internationalise, an important question is how successful they are in developing this skill. Both research and anecdotal evidence…

In conversations between immigrants and officials, problems of understanding are often noticeable. About 280 recordings realised at the Argentine Aliens' Department and at several public authorities in Germany show that knowledge divergences regarding linguistic, cultural and institutional knowledge result in (sometimes grave) difficulties of…

As contact between cultures continues to increase, the impact that this has on cultural identity and belonging is unclear. Cross-cultural or bicultural identification remains a relatively unexplored phenomenon. Is it possible, natural or potentially good to have an identity rooted in more than one culture? If so, how is cross-cultural identity…