Cultural diversity & encouraging communication across cultur

[Administrator]

Today, travelling has become necessary and accessible to more and more people.

This increased mobility exposes millions of travellers every day to new cultures, customs and languages. Without education, dialogue can be difficult and misunderstandings can arise.

You can get yourself in all sorts of trouble in other countries by not having an understanding of their cultural language. Much of our behaviour can mean other things in other countries, some of it amusing, some of it extremely offensive.

One gesture, or movement, or expression, may have many different meanings, just as our verbal language has words which may have different meanings.

This project has a philanthropic aim towards breeding acceptance of cultural diversity and encouraging communication across cultures.

Some people, when travelling to new countries, may forget to consider the different behavioural norms they are likely to encounter and behave exactly as they do at home.
In such circumstances, even minor cultural differences can become major barriers to communication and cooperation. This project aims to demystify these cultural differences and encourage visitors to embrace them.

The beauty of Europe lies in the fact that even though there is a firm movement towards standardisation for the sake of efficiency, there is a strong will to cultivate and to promote the diversity of languages and cultures of the different states. With our project we would like to contribute to this important philosophy.

More generally, and perhaps a little less pretentiously, we would simply like to put the idea in the minds of the passengers that it is useful and fun to learn about cultural differences.

The objectives of this project are:

- raising travellers' curiosity towards new languages
- breaking linguistic and cultural communication barriers
- using innovative communication tools and learning methods : teaching through entertainment
- offering free immediate access to educational information to travellers
- and last but not least, helping to kill time intelligently

This project is funded by the European Commission's Socrates-Lingua department and by Fortis Bank & Insurance.

We have produced 35 clips explaining Do's & Don'ts in the different countries of Europe, as well as language programs for 20 of the languages of Europe.
The cartoon is airing at Brussels Airport, on board Thomas Cook Airlines' planes and hopefully soon on television and on other airlines.

We hope to be able to produce more content in the future, extending our research to cover all the continents of the world.

More information can be found from the link below.

http://www.fastenseatbelts.eu/home.php