Watch Your Language Blog

Translating "personal space"

I came to this country as, I thought, a fairly proficient speaker of English, but, naturally, I soon realized there was much more for me to learn. What I did know was vocabulary and grammar, but I was rather ignorant about the rules of everyday conversation.

Simple things like making a phone call, and getting business done during that call, or approaching salespeople in the supermarket, and actually catching their attention, was a challenge. It was as if other people, the native speakers, had special codes for all this that I had no access to. And they did.

I started graduate school soon after I moved here, so many of my "culture shock" experiences were tied to it. I first started noticing things among some of my American professors - things like how greetings and personal space (before I knew it existed) were handled by them. I should say, at that time, I was busy noticing things as being different and weird; the why and how came only years later.

For example, I was surprised to see one of my professors say "hi" to me repeatedly, every time she saw me, several times in the course of the same day - could she have possibly forgotten that she saw me five minutes ago? I ascribed this to her professorial absentmindedness and, frankly, weirdness. She was also the one who, as we chatted at departmental parties, kept adjusting the distance between us, which rather spooked me out; she was always taking steps away from me (do I have a bad breath?), as I unknowingly kept coming closer to her, thinking this was accidental.

I realized later that both behaviors are rather the norm in this culture and that, in fact, from an American perspective, I was the one who was strange: I should have said "hi" back and stayed put to avoid the "my space" dance. In English, "Hi" is not just a greeting but a way to acknowledge someone's presence, similar to a smile, nod or direct look in the eye, the preferred tools of interaction where I come from (but plausible alternatives here as well).

As for personal space, things are very different in the US and Croatia. The expected distance between speakers is more rigidly observed here than it is there, and it is also considerably greater-maybe in correlation to the size of the countries?! As it turns out, the "personal space" averages in every culture can be measured pretty exactly in inches, despite the fact that most adjustments we make are really not more thought-out than our method of blowing our noses. - New York, NY

Tags: Croatia, culture shock, customs, newsletter
March 24, 2008