| Abstract [eng] |
Communication technologies’ improvement led to the greater relevance of communication itself in people’s daily life. Furthermore, the impact of globalization processes made the intercultural communication, an occurance formerly pertinent only to select few, into a subject-matter which concerns more and more people everyday. Mistakes, made while communicating with other people, may result in disastrous consequences varying from simple misunderstandings to the failures of the biggest trade transactions. And while the necessity makes people learn the rules of interaction, the intercultural context often reveals that communication competence is insufficient for intercultural communication. The improvement of transportation determined the increase of tourism sphere. More and more people choose to travel to other countries distant both geographically and culturally where the tourist realizes the need of intercultural communication competence. Therefore the intercultural communication competence is chosen as the object of this work. The purpose is to ascertain communication competence theory’s application in tourism sphere and to identify specifics of intercultural communication competence in tourism. Intercultural communication competence and tourism have attracted much attention from various scholars who applied different approaches to define those concepts. Yet the lack of interdisciplinary studies is unmistakable. Consequently the topicality of the work studying the relation of these subjects is incontrovertible. It is not yet agreed what the most important for the communication competence and the disagreement only escalates when the subject crosses the boundaries of single culture. While quite a few scientists concentrate on defining the main differences and classifying the cultures, many scholars think that knowing the main differences between cultures is not enough for intercultural communication competence which is recognized as the key instrument against problems occuring in intercultural communication. It was obvious, that all of the subjects, that have been looked from the theoretical perspective, had to be taken into account from more practical outlook, namely, from that of tourism. That would make it possible to evaluate various factors of intercultural communication competence that influence tourists during their travels. Communication competence was determined as a subject that can be learned, though for some people it might never be mastered because of their lack of talent for it. Nevertheless it was found, that this competence is not enough for effective interaction with foreigners. It must also be complemented by both general intercultural communication competence and unique knowledge of specific culture. Because of the fact, that tourists usually spend a short period of time in the context of different culture, they usually experience communication effectiveness problems such as misunderstandings, being at cross-purposes, rather than the effects of culture shock. But it‘s still hard to determine, what are the characteristics that are most important for the tourist, who seeks to avoid those problems. Although it became obvious that the practical blocks of intercultural communication competence are valued more highly than those of knowledge. It‘s hard to determine the universality of the research results. The way of learning intercultural communication obviously greatly depends upon the personal characteristics. Nevertheless, research shows that the main conclusions can be applied without taking into account the culture that tourists encounter in their travels. Though the objectives of the work were reached but the research described in this paper showed that the potential of the subject has not been exhausted and the need for further research was also recognized. |
