Voloshina Iryna

Iryna Voloshyna,

Lyulkun N.A.

ПР-06-1

Intercultural Communication for Ukraine:  
urgent necessity or fashionable trend? 

The world is becoming smaller and smaller today, and that is why it is very important for the people of different nationalities, cultures, religions to find the way of proper communication. Humanity has already experienced World Wars and conflicts that are still not solved. Most of them are based on intercultural misunderstanding.  

Nowadays it is vitally important for young specialists to learn foreign languages in order to make their negotiations and businesses more successful and to bring them to the international level. As for Ukraine - the awareness of foreign languages and cultures enables to bring it closer to the rest of the world after the decades of Cold war and Soviet times. But in the process of studying one needs to realize that speaking, writing and communicating in different languages and the fact that one knows any foreign language doesn’t mean that s/he fully understands the diversity in the way of thinking and world perception of the representatives of the alien cultural surrounding. The level of comprehending these diversities testifies how educated and broad-minded the person is. Language understanding is imperative for one who deals with someone from another cultural environment, but one should also consider semiotics and the system of signs to reach complete understanding. That is why intercultural contradictions play a more important role in ambiguities appearing in politics, business, literature and press, social and everyday life. Ukraine cannot afford to risk if it hopes to join the world community and develop.

Historically it happened so that there have always been contradictions between the East and the West, resulting in numerous wars, genocides and hostility. Having experienced it all, today's generation can not allow it to happen again. Thus there is a need of scientific approach for prevention and solving these problems.

Ukraine is a young developing country with great potentials. But it has not been represented in most of the main international organizations such as UN, EU, NATO etc. There can be several reasons for it – either Ukraine is not ready to represent itself on the world stage, or the world is not ready to except Ukraine yet. Anyway, the problem of misunderstanding does exist, and it needs to be solved. The science of cross-cultural communications is rarely studied in the educational establishments here, so unfortunately we do not have enough specialists in this field of study.

As one of the most outstanding American anthropologists Edward T. Hall said: “The reason man does not experience his true cultural self is that until he experiences another self as valid he has little basis for validating his own self.”

Thus the conclusion of my thesis is that Ukraine as a young country being on the halfway to Europe integration has to realize the necessity of studying and promoting the intercultural communications as a science. Ukraine has a huge cultural heritage to share with the world, but it needs to learn how to represent itself the way world would estimate and evaluate it on an appropriate level.

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