An alternative strategy for transcultural communication: Dialogic understanding of multiple voices

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Any phenomena or events of any culture require the perspective of other cultures to develop their potential. Much of the mainstream writing about transcultural communication in the West today is predicated on the fact that the West is a bad guy, and the non‐West is a good guy. This presumption is too simplistic because cultures are never semiotic systems with a closed totality. The aim of this essay is to define a new strategy for transcultural communication derived from the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical and critical concepts. His concept of dialogism, and of language provide us the specific ways in which those producers orchestrate diverse social voices. His emphasis on a boundless context helps us avoid formalist insistence on human relations. In other words, his emphasis on the situated utterance and the interpersonal generation of meaning avoids a value‐free semiotics.