Abstract
Too often, all communication genres are analyzed without recognizing the unavoidable impact of a
communicator’s cultural framework on producing, receiving, or attempting to comprehend the
document. Differing cultural preferences, varying rhetorical styles and discourse patterns, in addition
to linguistic elements, can easily cause information overload. This chapter analyzes the impact of
culture on information overload, primarily using Hall’s high context versus low context model. We
demonstrate that high and low context cultures correlate with typical discourse styles, using Kaplan’s
model as an example. Hinds’ theory of Reader versus Writer Responsibility for comprehension
provides further insights into possible causes of cross-cultural information overload. A shared
professional and/or corporate culture may mitigate the cross-cultural issues in some cases, although it
does not eliminate them. Cases from specific cultures—Latin American, Japanese, Chinese, and
others—are used to demonstrate the issues discussed in this chapter.
With so many textual elements acting as potential problems for international communicators,
translating documents from one language to another is often not enough. Localization, or making a product linguistically and culturally appropriate for the target audience, makes an important
contribution to reducing the cognitive load. The significant conclusion is that the major cause of
information overload in cross-cultural situations is having to process information in different
discourse patterns from different cultural frameworks. This area is in need of solid empirical
research to determine the nature and extent of the load, which will inform practices to reduce it.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Information overload : an international challenge for professional engineers and technical communicators |
Editors | J.D.B. Strother, J.M. Ulijn, Z. Fazal |
Place of Publication | Chichester |
Publisher | Wiley-IEEE |
Pages | 79-102 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-1182-3013-8 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2012 |
Externally published | Yes |