Cross-Cultural Communication

Bullhorns Across cultures, people differ in how they relate to time, to power, to customers, to the group; how they solve problems; how they view customs, contracts and protocols. These differing cultural assumptions affect workplace behavior. Often, participants in a bilingual bicultural project feel bewildered and helpless, not knowing how to confront and work with all these differences. Our approach is to provide order to cultural chaos and empower clients to proactively search for cultural differences in an organized way. Working with cultural difference is a challenge, and that's important to know for everybody who is involved in a bilingual (which means bicultural) project.

Sonia Melnikova-Raich helps project managers and team members working for bilingual projects, joint ventures, and companies doing business in Russia and FSU work effectively across cultures. She will help you to develop understanding about cultural differences and how they affect the way people manage projects and accomplish work tasks. She will assist you with:

Cultural Differences Tree

  • detecting the different ways of thinking in a different culture that will impact your project
  • developing a clear understanding of the specific workplace challenge
  • troubleshooting problems involving cultural differences
  • mediating cross-cultural conflict resolution in a crisis situation
  • developing a corresponding set of cross-cultural strategies that will address those challenges, and a process for incorporating these strategies into your team work
  • learning strategies for using cultural difference creatively to enhance the project

and most important of all,

  • keeping the lines of communication clear when you transmit information across the culture barrier in person, over the phone, or by e-mail.

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Certified Russian translation by a Certified Russian Translator: Sonia Melnikova-Raich is a Russian-English translator certified by American Translators Association (ATA). She is a certified Russian translator, certified Russian interpreter, certified court interpreter, Russian court interpreter certified by the State of California and Judicial Council of California, and a federal court interpreter. She has twenty years experience with expertise in legal translation, business translation, real estate translation, health care translation, medical translation, education translation, environment translation, communication translation, social services translation, social science translation, marketing and advertising translation and cultural adjustment, religion translation, art, film and video translation, architecture translation, and literary translation from Russian into English and from English into Russian. She works as a court interpreter for Superior Court of California, US Federal Court, USCIS (INS), Workers Compensation Board, and interprets for depositions, arbitration, trials, immigration and political asylum interviews, business meetings, and conferences. She provides certified translation of diplomas, academic transcripts, birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, divorce certificates, adoption papers, immigration documents, business contracts, immunization records, and other legal documents in compliance with requirements of the USCIS (INS), US courts, credentials evaluation services, medical boards, boards of registered nursing, American colleges and universities. She can also provide a certificate of translation (affidavit of translation or affidavit of translation accuracy), and notarized translation, if needed. She translates from English into Russian and from Russian into English. She interprets English to Russian and Russian to English, performing consecutive interpreting, simultaneous interpreting, sight interpreting, and voice over. Other services include linguistic analysis of company and product names, localization and cultural adjustment, Russian-American cross-cultural communication, cultural sensitivity training, and cross-cultural conflict resolution.