Let me illustrate an intercultural situation here:
This scenario happened during my involvement in an overseas expedition project. Our team consists of 18 Chinese and 1 Korean student. All of us speak a common language- English. However, during some of our group discussions and team bonding sessions, I noticed that many of the Chinese students tended to unintentionally switch to mandarin all over the place in their conversations. I suppose that is the usual and comfortable ‘Singaporean’ way of conversing with friends. Unfamiliar lingos used by us would often return a blank face from the Korean girl. Unfortunately, the feelings of this Korean student were inadequately taken into consideration because she could not understand mandarin and hence was able to grasp the full meaning if we spoke in that unique manner.
Although I tried prompting the rest to speak in English several times, I realised on many occasions that the Korean girl would start to look away and appear uninterested in the topic or start to use her handphone. There were times when she just walked off to the restroom in the midst of casual chats among team mates. On other ocassions she would join in the conversation of another group who were speaking in English instead.
I felt guilty about the team not being culturally sensitive enough to someone from a different culture speaking a different language. Being afraid of upsetting the Korean girl, I very much wanted to tell off some individuals for not putting in the effort to respect other’s existence by speaking in English and not to be ambiguous in describing ideas. However, I chose to hint them instead because I believe many of them are used to speaking in a mixed variety of languages and even dialects in one sentence.
For the Korean girl, I guess she felt irritated, helpless and isolated every time we do this unintentionally but was being polite not to ask us to translate everything in English again. There could easily be misunderstandings of us trying to ignore her existence or dismiss her off as unimportant member. In addition, the lack of response from the Korean girl may incorrectly come across to us as being uninterested in our topic of discussion when in fact she could not understand what we are saying in the first place.
In a nutshell, I think that in intercultural communications, we have to be self-aware and also mindful of the differences in norms, values and languages. Perhaps the Korean girl was kind enough to pretend that she was not neglected and still keep a smiling face but we have to constantly remind ourselves that it is rude and disrespectful to behave in the way we did although unintentionally. This would then create a warm and supportive environment for all, where effective communications would definitely result!
