POTENTIAL PROBLEMS OF USING ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

In the contemporary business world, partners belonging to different nations and hence different cultures establish business contacts and conduct business operations. As a rule, such business operations are conducted in either the language of one of the parties involved or in a third, neutral language, serving as lingua franca. Thus, language skills, which are an essential component of the communicative competence in a business environment, imply a certain extent of implicit or explicit translating and interpreting. The functionalist approaches in translation science and most of all the Skopos theory by the German scholar J. H. Vermeer view translation as an intercultural transfer, which inevitably entails taking into account intercultural differences. In intercultural business communication, communicative situations are directly affected by the legal system as an essential element of the source and target culture. The parties involved thus need to be acquainted with the legal and economic systems of the source and target culture. This is especially the case with English, as the Anglo-American legal system, based essentially on common law, differs substantially from the continental law, to which most of the European countries belong. The non-equivalence of many legal concepts and terms pertaining to these two systems thus has to be taken into consideration. In this paper, cases of non-equivalence regarding legal terms which are very often used in business communication will be illustrated with examples from company law