National cultures in international communication

Technical communication involves senders (authors), messages, and readers (users). Relationships among these three elements are predicated on informational goals: for the user, the need for specific pieces of information; for the author, responding to that need for information. The author accommodates the reader in a number of ways by adapting the information so that the reader can understand it. For example, the author can use syntactical arrangement to communicate information about the information or provide additional wording to tell the user how to read the text. Among the many ways the author can communicate meaning is context (pragmatics)-both primary (the text, or direct experience, or both) and secondary (the cultural context). If the language the message uses is the user´s first language, the user should understand the cultural context. If the message´s language is not the user´s first language, the author should not assume that the reader is familiar with the cultural context. The author must carefully select appropriate language codes for not only the content, but also the cultural implications. The paper explores those circumstances when a communicator is communicating to someone when English is not their first language and offers some suggestions on how to communicate more effectively. First, however, it looks at the cultural basis for language including language codes. Second, the article looks at a specific device authors can use to provide users with context (metadiscourse) and analyzes an example