Alignment of Remote Cultures: In Contrast to the Relevance Theory of Communication

Abstract

As the role of ontology in a multilingual setting becomes important to Semantic Web development, it becomes necessary to understand and model how an original conceptual meaning of a Source Language word is conveyed into a Target Language translation. Terminological ontology [1] is a tool used for knowledge sharing and domain-specific translation, and could potentially be suitable for simulating the cognitive models explaining real-world inter-cultural communication scenarios. In this paper, a framework referred to as the Relevance Theory of Communication [2] is contrasted to an empirical study applying Tversky´s contrast model [3] to data-sets obtained from the terminological ontology. The results indicate that the alignment of two language-dependent terminological ontologies is a potential method for optimizing the relevance required in inter-cultural communication, in other words, for identifying corresponding concepts existing in two remote cultures.