Cross-Cultural Communication: Its Asymmetry and Authenticity

Abstract

The paper analyses a cross-cultural asymmetry in scientific papers and their titles in Russian and in English, exposes most characteristic distinctions between authentic scientific paper titles in both languages and shows explicit incongruency between authentic paper titles in English and those literally translated from Russian, which often demonstrate cross-linguistic interference between Russian and English academic style. Special attention is payed to its reasons and the ways to overcoming it, as well as to discrepancies in Russian vs. English academic style predetermined by their different grammatical organization and culture-specific cognitive and communicative dominants in the interaction between the author and the reader. The extensive corpus-based empirical data for the carried out contrastive investigation covers authentic scientific paper titles in Russian, their published translations into English, and authentic scientific paper titles from leading international linguistic journals, published in English in 2018-2020 and indexed in Scopus. The overall corpus volume is 7800 titles.

Keywords

• cross-cultural communication
• contrastive analysis
• asymmetry
• authenticity
• academic style in english vs. russian
• literal translation
• cross-linguistic interference