Localization of conceptual information in intercultural dialogue

Abstract

This paper deals with one aspect of mitigating barriers to communication that arise from misunderstandings of the conceptual meanings of national-specific lexical units in the context of university education. The localization of the conceptual information is recognized as a means of such mitigation.

The objective of the article is to prove the possibility of applying the term and procedures of localization to the linguistic and cultural interpretation of the conceptual national specific vocabulary for the intercultural dialogue. Whatever the substantive or socio-ethical goals of intercultural dialogue, its purpose is to develop the cognitive system of its participants. Each producer of a dialogue builds its own trajectory of knowledge actualization, relying on its inherent mental and cultural experience, which has been transmitted or formed in contact with the environment, especially in the educational domain. The dialogue becomes a medium of perception, cognition, comprehension, and cognitive adaptation of the cultural and semantic information which is carried by the word-concept, i.e. the problem of localization of conceptual information within another language and culture will be solved. The methodological principle of the research was a combination of cognitive approach to conceptual vocabulary understanding with hermeneutic and linguistic and cultural analysis.

To get a better idea of localization in the article, as a methodological technique during the deployment of intercultural dialogue, the author proposes some national-specific linguistic units from the poem “Aeneid” by Ivan Kotlarevsky. Such units form conceptual information and can be part of the dialogue system in various disciplines at Tunisian language institutions of higher education. Specific examples illustrate, as a result, the theoretical assertion that there is a need to study in depth the conceptual information that helps reduce disruptions in the “communicant-communicant” relationship and avoid breaking the communication line in a dialogue.