How to overcome complexities of interdisciplinary communication? Translation from one disciplinary language into another for interdisciplinary course design

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of the first stage of interdisciplinary course design, which is aimed at the development of the communicative competence across disciplines in business education. The complexities of interdisciplinary communication caused by team members' diverse professional backgrounds, areas of expertise, organizational contexts, life experiences and unique disciplinary languages need to be under control on the way to achieve the intended goals. To foster the interdisciplinary course outcomes, we modeled the translation process from one disciplinary perspective with its scientific language into a language that is understandable to members of different disciplinary expertise. The model stems from the definition of translation as an intralingual transformation process inherent in communication of diverse disciplinary groups in order to co-create new interdisciplinary meaning and achieve the shared goals. It was applied to translation of learning goals and objectives from the language of the business and management course into the language of the English language and communication course to facilitate the process of interdisciplinary collaboration among the team members. The effect of the translation process lay in the team members' better understanding of the integration principle of the interdisciplinary course. This study can give impetus to further research to investigate the process of intralingual translation as a social practice and factors of successful interdisciplinary communication.