Listening 2. Male-Female Conversation as Cross-cultural Communication

In the last lecture, you heard about the relationship between culture and classroom communication. In this lecture, I’ll talk about another variable that affects human communication. That variable is gender. Gender is the social identity that men and women learn as they grow up in a culture. For example, boys learn to be "masculine" and girls learn to be "feminine" as they grow to be men and women. Researchers have shown that men and women (and boys and girls, for that matter) communicate in quite different ways and in different amounts, depending on the situation the speakers find themselves in, and the reason or reasons they're communicating with other people.

Many cultures actually encourage men and women to talk differ­ently and in different amounts, and these patterns for communicat­ing are learned when men and women are young boys and girls. Chil­dren learn how to talk to other children or adults, and how to have conversations, not only from their parents, but also from their peers - other boys and girls their age. In her best-selling book, You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen points out that although American boys and girls often play together, they spend most of their time playing in same-sex groups. She also points out that boys and girls do play some games together, but their favorite games are very often quite different. Tannen and other researchers on this topic have found that young boys, say ages eight through twelve tend to play outside the home rather than in, and they play in large groups that are hierarchically structured. The group of boys generally has a leader who tells the other boys what to do and how to do it. It is by giving orders and making the other boys play by the rules that boys achieve higher and more dominant status in the play group. Boys also achieve status by taking "center stage." They take center stage by talking a lot; they give orders and commands; they tell a lot of stories and jokes. They command attention by dominating conversations and by interrupting other boys who are speaking. The researchers also found that boys' games often have clear winners and losers and elaborate systems of rules.

Researchers found that girls play different kinds of games and abide by different rules when playing their game. In addition, girls in groups use different patterns of communication and different styles of com­munication when playing together. Tannen and her colleagues have found that young girls often play in small groups or in pairs. They play less often in large groups or teams outside the home. Girls' play is not so hierarchically ordered as boys' play is. In their most frequent games, like hopscotch and jump rope, every girl gets a chance to play. In many of their play activities, such as playing house, there are no "winners" or "losers." Researchers have also found that girls usually don't give many direct orders or commands to their playmates; they express their preferences as suggestions, according to Tannen. Girls often say to their playmates, "Let's do this... or that." Boys, on the other hand, are more direct in ordering their playmates to do this or that. Tannen is quick to point out that North American boys as well as girls want to get their way and want other children to do what they want them to do; however, boys and girls try to get their playmates to do what they want them to do in different ways.

Another well-known researcher, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, com­pared boys and girls engaged in two task-oriented activities. The boys were making slingshots in preparation for a fight. The girls were mak­ing jewelry; they were making rings for their fingers. Goodwin noted that the boys' activity group was hierarchically arranged. The "leader" told the other boys what to do and how to do it. The girls making the rings were more egalitarian. Everyone made suggestions about how to make the rings, and the girls tended to listen and accept the sugges­tions of the other girls in the group.

Goodwin is not suggesting that girls never engage in some of the communication and management behaviors boys engage in. In fact, in another study, she found that when girls play house, the girl who plays the mother gives orders to the girls who play the children. Girls seem to give orders to their peers less often than boys do when they play. The girls are practicing parent-child relationships in the game of play­ing house. It's very likely that when little boys play their games, they are also practicing the masculine roles they're expected to assume when they grow up.

As a result of our cultural upbringing, we learn norms of behavior and patterns of communication that are often gender based, and some­times gender biased. We also develop stereotypes about how and how much males and female - that is, boys and girls or women and men - should, and do communicate. However, researchers have shown that many of these stereotypes actually turn out to be quite wrong.

A common stereotype that many people hold is the idea that women talk a lot, perhaps too much, and that they are always inter­rupting or trying to get "center stage" when someone else is talking. There is, in fact, a proverb that reinforces this idea. It states that "foxes are all tail and women are all tongue." Actually, recent research on the influence of gender on communication has shown the exact opposite to be true in many instances!

Researchers have found that men usually produce more talk than women and are more likely to interrupt another speaker than women will - particularly in public settings, such as business meetings. So although women are believed to talk more than men, study after study has shown that it is men who talk more at meetings, in mixed-group discussions, and in classrooms where girls or young women sit next to boys or young men. And this finding holds even for commu­nicative interactions between very educated and successful profes­sional men and women, such as professors, for example. Deborah Tannen, in her book You Just Don't Understand, cites a study con­ducted by Barbara and Gene Eakins, who tape-recorded and studied seven university faculty meetings. They found that, with one excep­tion, men professors spoke more often and, without exception, for a longer period of time than the women professors did. The men took center stage and talked from 10.66 seconds to 17.07 seconds, while the women talked from 3 to 10 seconds, on the average. Tannen points out that the women's longest turns were still shorter than the men's shortest turns. Angela Simeone reports another example of this phenomenon in her book, Academic Women. She found that women professors talk at departmental meetings less often than their male colleagues do. When asked how often they spoke at departmen­tal meetings, 46 percent of the American men professors reported that they spoke often at these meetings, but only 15 percent of the women professors reported that they spoke often at departmental meetings.

Perhaps it is our social concept of what is feminine and what is masculine that reinforces the stereotype that women talk more than men, and even causes these different patterns of communication. Maybe a woman is labeled talkative or is criticized for interrupting if she does these things at all, because our culture - as well as many cul­tures - teaches that women should be quiet if they want to be "femi­nine." Perhaps masculine culture encourages boys and men to domi­nate talk and to interrupt more often, and males who talk a lot and interrupt often are not criticized for doing so. These differences in the patterns of communication and styles of communicating are studied by researchers who study the effects of gender on communication. They study these effects in order to understand why misunderstand­ings occur between men and women in conversation. Often, it's because their styles and patterns of conversation are so different. It is important that we learn to recognize these differences so that we can learn to communicate better with people of the other gender. It is im­portant to emphasize that these differences may be specific to North American culture. Gender can affect communication in even more and stronger ways in some other cultures. In Zulu culture, for example, a wife is forbidden to say any words that sound like the names of her father-in-law or brothers. This means that she must paraphrase these words, and she is expected to do so.

So you see, cultural differences are not the only things that affect language and communication. Language is affected by gender as well. I'm sure you can think of many ways that gender affects communica­tion between men and women in your own culture.

PART 4. POLITICALLY CORRECT LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE OF POLITICS

LISTENING 1. Looking for Red Meat Political Terms That Won't Bring a Hail of Dead Cats

AA:   I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble and this week on WORDMASTER: A U.S. presidential election means a flurry of often colorful political terms, especially in the media.

RS:   To help explain some of them, VOA's Adam Phillips in New York interviewed William Safire, the New York Times language columnist and editor of Safire’s Political Dictionary. First published in 1968, it was recently updated and reissued with more than half a million entries.

AA:   They include a phrase that William Safire himself wrote during his days as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: "I was looking for some criticism of people who were defeatist, who thought that we could never win in Vietnam. And so I came up with the nattering nabobs of negativism. That is known as red meat rhetoric. When you talk about 'there is no red meat in this speech,' that means there is no ammunition you can feed your supporters to use or throw into the cage of a lion that was hungry.

"Politicians have to use metaphors and similes and word pictures and figures of speech in order to capture attention and encapsulate an idea or a vague program that otherwise would put people to sleep. So they have to say 'I'm gonna offer you a New Deal' or 'take you to a New Deal - I've just quoted President [Franklin] Roosevelt and [John] Kennedy - or suggest a New Covenant. Now that was suggested by Bill Clinton and it didn't fly for some reason. You never know when the political language is going to work or when it's gonna lay an egg.

ADAM PHILLIPS: "So political speech has two functions. One is to draw attention to oneself as a politician, so that people sit up and pay attention, and the other is to explain a complicated idea in a shorthand form."

WILLIAM SAFIRE: "Shorthand is very important in political language. For example, a word that's flying around now is superdelegate. We used to call them party elders or, before that, party bosses. The fun of the political language is to stop and say 'What am I saying? Does it have the right overtones, the right coloration?' When we talk about superdelegates, there is a sinister quality to 'superdelegates,' because it suggests some delegates are subdelegates, or not as important. And that's going to be a controversy in the coming Democratic convention.

ADAM PHILLIPS: William Safire has often pointed out that political speech is always changing. New words and phrases get created, and older ones attain new relevance. He gives the phrase fire in the belly as one example.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: "A candidate has to have ambition and a real burning desire to become whatever he's running for. And that's called fire in the belly. And it was a problem that Barack Obama had, because he was essentially cool, intellectual. He actually talked in paragraphs. So there was a feeling he didn't have fire in the belly. He recognized that and worked out a phrase that had a resonance in the black community, because it was used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 'Are you fired up? Are you ready to go?' And they would shout back 'Ready to go!' And that gave the feeling that, indeed, he had fire in the belly. 

"You've got to remember that the most important thing about political language is its vividness, it's calling up of an image in your mind. In the nineteen thirties, someone who left under great criticism, it was said that he left in a hail of dead cats. You can envision a cartoon really of a man running with cats being thrown at him.

"And economists, political economists, also came up with a feline image. Cat lovers don't like this phrase, but when the stock market goes down and down and down, and then comes back up a little, they call that a dead cat bounce. When a cat hits the ground and bounces back, it doesn't mean it's alive, it just means that was what we would call a sucker rally.

ADAM PHILLIPS: "There's another one, right?"

WILLIAM SAFIRE: "I do that unconsciously, I guess!"

ADAM PHILLIPS: "I guess we all do. That's how come we know they're really words."

WILLIAM SAFIRE: "No, you know they're really words when you look them up in the Political Dictionary!"

AA:     New York Times language columnist, and former White House speechwriter, William Safire is the editor of Safire’s Political Dictionary, recently published in revised and updated form by Oxford University Press. He spoke with VOA's Adam Phillips in New York.

RS:  We'll have more of that interview next week on WORDMASTER. Our segments can all be found online at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

LISTENING 2. Language Police

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER we discuss a new book: "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."

RS: The author is Diane Ravitch, a historian of education and a professor at New York University. She was appointed assistant secretary of education for research in 1991 when George W. Bush's father was president. Then Bill Clinton appointed her to an agency that supervises national testing.

AA: Through her work, Diane Ravitch learned that publishers develop what are known as "bias and sensitivity guidelines.” Her position is that publishers use these guidelines to censor and sanitize tests and textbooks.

RAVITCH: "I had trouble obtaining many of those that I eventually obtained. And I ended up with something like, oh, 32 single-spaced pages of words that you're not supposed to use. So, for example, you're not supposed to use the word 'cult' or 'fanatic' or 'extremist' or 'dogma.' These are all considered ethnocentric words. You're not supposed to use the expression 'The Founding Fathers.' This is considered a sexist statement. Any word that has the word 'man' or the three letters M-A-N, whether it's 'manpower' or 'businessman,' these are banned words. Two of the publishers say that you mustn't say 'the elderly,' so you replace that with 'older persons.'"

AA: "I read from your book that 'slave' is no longer an acceptable word."

RAVITCH: "Right, the word 'slave' is supposed to be replaced by the expression 'enslaved person.' And I had a discussion the other day with an African American talk show host, and we agreed that this is what you would call a distinction without a difference, because neither of these is a voluntary condition. No one chooses to be a slave, just as no one chooses to be an enslaved person, and it's really a linguistic nonsense issue, as far as I'm concerned."

AA: "I've heard it said that conservatives get upset about ideas and liberals get upset about words."

RAVITCH: "That's exactly the divide that I found, that conservatives were eager to ban certain topics. For instance, the mention of divorce or the separation of family. They also objected to stories about disobedient children or they objected to stories about crime that goes unpunished, whereas liberals were concerned about any words that reflected on women as being in let's say a wifely role or appearing as a nurse or a secretary or a teacher or in a role that they just didn't want women portrayed in. The irony is all of this to me is that language does change, language does evolve, and many of the terms that are in this glossary of banned words have disappeared just through the natural evolution of language.

"Our language, the English language and particularly American English, is very dynamic in the sense that words enter our language that are new, they come about through technological change and social change, and then other words, older words simply disappear."

RS: "If a student of English as a foreign language were to read a history or a literature textbook written for an American audience, what kind of impression would he or she come out with?"

RAVITCH: "If they were reading a textbook that was prepared for high school, it would be extremely, I don't know, mixed up in terms of genre. There would be items about science, about global warming, about social studies, and at a certain point you would not get any sense of what is the American literary tradition. You would not know who are considered the greatest American writers because there would be no distinction made between, let's say, an essay written by a 16-year-old somewhere, a piece of a television script from a recent TV program, some sort of encyclopedia-type article, and then maybe some classics mixed in."

RS: "Is this because we can't sell textbooks or we can't make tests that can be approved by a committee?"

RAVITCH: "This whole situation has come about because we have this practice across the country of statewide textbook adoptions. So if a publisher wants to sell textbooks in today's marketplace, they must attempt to sell in California and Texas, which are the two biggest states, they have the largest number of students, and so the worst thing for a textbook publisher is controversy. And so they remove whatever might be offensive to people who might have strong views, either on the right or on the left. The result of this situation is that there has been enormous concentration in the textbook industry. We now have four huge corporations that dominate about eighty percent of the textbook market."

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PART 5. TRANSLATION AS A PROFESSION

LISTENING 1. Interview between the journalist and Fiona Guiffs, the translator.

J. - In these days more and more people learn foreign languages, but this didn't reduce the demand for translators. As more and more nations trade with each other and have greater contact with each other, so more and more translators are required. But what exactly does the job involve ? And what are the highs and lows of being a translator? I spoke to Fiona Guiffs, a translator for many years. And, first of all, I asked her what presents translators with the greatest difficulty?

F. - The worst problem, believe or not, has little to do with language, it has more to do with personality. I'm not talking about nationality, by the way. Because my experience is that you can find the same sorts of people anywhere. Now, what people are like as individuals causes the real trouble. I mean, take jokes, for example. You can be translating for somebody, and they say something that's meant to be funny and you just know the person you translate it to isn't going to find it the least that funny, because they have a totally different sense of humour. The whole thing falls flat and you feel terribly silly translating it.

J. - What made you want to be a translator?

F. - Well, of course, the fascination for language was the starting point. I mean from a very early age I had, I suppose, a gift for languages and I realized that I could pick them up very quickly. So when I left school, there wasn't really much doubt as to what I'll do at the university and then for a living. Also I thought it would be pretty well paid, that it would enable me to travel and to gain a real understanding of other cultures. And that it would give me job satisfaction because I would be helping people who speak different languages to get on together and work together.

J. - And has it all proved to be the case?

F. – Well, yes and no. The money side of it, certainly, hasn't turned out to be totally true. But at the same time, I suppose, I can’t really complain. I have traveled a lot and that's been quite enjoyable. Although, it's involved a lot of very hard work, too. I've learned an enormous amount about a variety of cultures and attitudes. But I couldn't honestly say that this has lead me to a real understanding of them. I mean, sometimes it's true that the more you learn, the less you know. People really aren't at all simple. And you soon find out that you can't generalize about nationalities. I would certainly say, though, that I do help people from different countries to work and socialize together and I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.

J. - Give me an example.

F. - Well, let me see. Yes, well, there was an occasion I was translating in a business meeting and a problem was clearly beginning to emerge. I was translating for a client in some rather delicate negotiations. But the other person clearly didn't like his manner. My client was, to be honest, being rather aggressive and uncooperative. And it looked to me, as if the other man was going to get up and storm out of the room any minute. So I started to translate my client's words, well, I made them a little bit softer, less direct, should we say. I mean, I translated it all properly, that's my job, but I phrased it slightly more politely than the original. And the atmosphere soon improved. By the end they reached the compromise they were both happy with and the meeting broke up with them being the best friends.

J. - And what's the worst situation you've been in as a translator?

F. - Oh, that's easy. I was translating for two politicians at a conference. And the one employing me really detested the other one. I mean, it was obviously a personal dislike. So he started insulting him and I had to translate all these terrible insults: I had no choice! He was the one paying me. It was just awful! I thought there was going to be a fight and I was worried that the other politician might hit me of something because, after all, I was the one actually saying all these terrible things to him. I was pretty bad to get to the end, I can tell you.

J. - So, all in all, is that the job you would recommend?

F. - Yes. Certainly, that kind of thing doesn't happen very often. But it's not as glamorous as some people seem to think. You do travel a lot, but it's hard work and you often don't see much of the places you visit. Most of the time I thoroughly enjoy my work. But I must admit it's tending to be boring sometimes. Certainly, you need to have, as I do, a real feel for languages. It's just not enough to have studied them, I really like working with them. I certainly can't imagine myself doing anything else.

J. - Thanks very much, Fiona. I've enjoyed very much talking to you.

LISTENING 2. Is something lost in translation?

Interviewer: If you read a great work of literature that’s been translated have you missed much of the meaning that was in the original? The Times columnist Michael Gove who also happens to be in the shadow cabinet wrote a few weeks ago that “reading translated literature involved a loss of nuance, a sacrifice of subtlety a few will admit to”. He received some furious replies not least from Professor Tony Briggs who translated Penguin’s “War and Peace”, he wrote “I would wince for your shrunken life if you have not yet read “War and Peace” and he also whole-heartedly disagreed with the premise that was put forward. Well both gentlemen join me now. Michael Gove, Professor Briggs, good morning to both.

Pr. B. and M.G. (together): Good morning.

Interviewer: Michael Gove, we’d better, first of all, set up what was it that prompted this comment.

M.G.: Well, I was thinking about the summer holidays, about what I was going to read and I have one prejudice which is that it is always better to try over the summer to go back to the classics than trying to keep up with contemporary fiction. But then when I was thinking about the classics one thought struck me. If I’m going to try and read any of the great classics like “War and Peace” for example I just know that they are not going to mean to me as much as they will to someone who has the original Russian. And the reason that I know that is that I know that when I read greatest English novelists, when I read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens it’s simply impossible for the grace, the wit, the nuance, the subtlety to be transferred. You know at the beginning of “Pride and Prejudice” when Jane Austen begins, you know, “Every man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” and if you don’t know that it’s a deeply ironic comment which is going to be a prelude to a subversion of that line, then you’re lost for most of the book. And I think you need to understand English and in particular you need to understand the particular tone of voice with the irony Austen uses in order to get it.

Interviewer: Professor Briggs, if that applies to English novels, then it must apply to Russian, French, whatever other countries’ novels?

Pr. B.: Well, you might think so. Too quick observations before we open up the line of response. First of all when I tuned in at 7 o’clock this morning before the programme began and what they were trailing was, over the workings of coincidence, this afternoon’s Saturday play an adaptation of a translation of a work by Alexander Solzhenitsin “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. From that you get the essential truth about the whole of the abused prison system called ‘Gulag’ in the Soviet Union. All the historians in Russia will tell you that that’s the best rendition of that and you get a huge amount of it by reading it in translation. Second observation, quick one, Michael, I don’t have much of a bind with you now because that you were gracious enough to say that some of your ideas have been proved to be in your own phrase ‘a ball’s ack’. It’s a response that came in from Matthew Parris he’s the one who deserves the full Sarah Pallin treatment for what he said. He virtually said that it is never any use reading any translation at all. Well, take the Solzhenitsin I’ve just mentioned. That’s a fairly difficult work to translate, because there’d be some technical terms to do with the building operations that people go out in and a lot of prison slang. So it will sound a little distorted in English but a very substantial amount of the truth will come over to you. Now as far as “War and Peace” is concerned it is right at the easier, more useful end of the spectrum of translation. If you take a tiny little poem «Я Вас любил, любовь еще быть может…» by Pushkin that’s going to be not just difficult, but impossible to translate, because it’s all language, nuance, tone and every syllable, every phoneme has to be in place and the other end of the spectrum is “War and Peace”.

Interviewer: Professor Briggs, I’m so sorry but we’re eating up our 5 minutes of allotted time so I must bring Michael, go back to the programme…

M.G.: Professor Briggs is so much more notable …

Interviewer: But let me… I want to turn you at just what the professor Briggs pointed out that I quoted in the introduction “I would wince for your shrunken life if you have not yet read “War and Peace” as he makes it out to you... you just can’t dive in half way through? Does it have a lesson?

M.G.: He does give some good advice. He’s acting, I suppose, as any evangelist of great literature should be on the basis that you have to do everything possible to make it palatable. But one of the reservations I still have is that Matthew Parris makes, I think, it a very well point of what Matthew was reading over the summer a work a few will have done – George Elliot’s “Scenes from Clerical Life” and he’d loved it. And the truth is that there are huge numbers of works by even first rate authors that we still don’t read and some second rate authors - J. Hogg, G. Meredith – in the English language which are still absolutely cracking reads. And if you devote yourself to them you get not just brilliant plots, not just something about human condition which is lasting but you also get a precision in the use of language which (for) anyone who loves literature is an added bonus.

Interviewer: Professor Briggs, can I ask you as briefly as possible? Haven’t you responded to that that when you read an English poem and it’s very hard to believe that it doesn’t lose something when it’s translated into another language?

Pr. B.: Michael, I think, has got it wrong, you know. If a mature educated, cultivated read person reads a translation of “War and Peace” he’ll probably get more out of it than a native speaker who is young and inexperienced, and perhaps reading it at a bad time and not concentrating. Each reading experience is unique. It’s very rare for people to read in such a way that they are conscious of every nuance and every little shift of meaning and so on. And for big works of prose it matters far less than it does in relation to lyric poetry.

Interviewer: Professor Tony Briggs, Michael Gove, thank you both.

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Учебное издание

Составитель Елена Геннадьевна Воскресенская