Idioms and Back Translation‪.‬

THE CHALLENGES of intercultural communication are an integral part of most undergraduate business communication courses. Marketing gaffes easily illustrate the pitfalls of translation and underscore the importance of a knowledge of the culture with which one is attempting to communicate. General Motors's marketing of the Nova in Central and South America, Electrolux's early American advertising slogan "nothing sucks like an Electrolux," and Clairol's unsuccessful pitching of a curling iron to Germans as a "manure stick" are notorious. These entertaining examples, even bolstered by illustrations of high and low context and the usual prescriptive warnings about formats of dates and use of slang, however, did not create among my business communication students a sense of legitimate concern about intercultural communication problems. I wanted to develop exercises that would actively involve them in translation issues. This was particularly challenging because I could not, of course, assume that students all had studied the same foreign language. Instead, we began with our own supposedly common language. STUDENTS AND ENGLISH IDIOMS