Some things to consider with regard to
communication:
A text, whether spoken or written, is
not itself a message but only a vehicle for a message. Also, it is
not independent of speaker and hearer. In fact, in any act of
discourse, we have to recognize not only the message
but:
the sender and the receiver and their relationship;
the code
(the words themselves--lexical choice, sentence structure, intonation, etc.;
also, which language is in use);
the verbal context (other related
messages, or other parts of the same message, and you can draw circles
outward to include the entire linguistic history of both
participants);
the channel or medium;
and the concrete context (actual objects
and events in the participants' environment[s] and known to them--and
circles could be drawn outward to include the whole culture[s] in which the
participants live and move).
All of these elements affect the outcome. Think
how much is going on in each; there can be particular strain arising from any of
them. Consider just the code, for example: supposing the sender's use
of pronouns lacks cohesion, or there are fewer connectors than usual,
or she is using a particularly high or low register of formality, or he
resorts to puns, abbreviation, ellipsis, idiosyncratic word choices,
malapropisms, etc.
The verbal context always constrains
the sense of individual words or phrases or sentences. Temporary conventions
arise, for instance, either implicitly or explicitly, some of which may even
conflict with longer-term conventions. As for the larger verbal context
consisting of the language history of each participant, one of them may
deliberately draw in other messages, by means of quotation or allusion, say,
that the other has no access to. And of course they will each be accustomed
to certain ways of using words.
Or the message itself can be a very difficult
one to encode and decode. It might be a surprising or complex or unpleasant
message. It can include things that have not been experienced
or imagined by the receiver.
When participants have a "long and broad"
shared verbal context that makes them likely to use the code in similar
ways, when they have good command of the code itself, and when they are
operating in similar concrete contexts, the communicative results will
obviously be much better than they are otherwise. Using a channel that
reduces ambiguity also helps ensure that what the sender sends is received
by the receiver. For example, face-to-face talk provides lots of
redundancy in the form of voice, gesture, facial _expression_, etc. to
disambiguate the message, and also means that there is a shared [immediate]
concrete context.
Under the sender and receiver themselves
we can consider, among many other things, their state of mind, motives,
etc. on the given occasion. If there is limited good will or
confidence, for example, all of the other variables can be favourable
and the result will still be poor.
Additional note: translation will magnify any
strain already arising from other elements. It is the source
of strain in its own right as well, since different languages are
spoken by groups that live or have lived together and therefore
entail different concrete contexts.
Debbie