Prof. David Katan, is senior editor of Cultus: the Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication, on the editorial board of RITT-International Journal of Translation and ESP Across Cultures. He taught at the “Interpreters’ School”, University of Trieste, Italy, for 20 years before taking up the chair at the University of Salento (Lecce). He is now Director of Studies for the undergraduate course in Linguistic Mediation and the graduate course in Translation and Interpreting.

He has published over 50 articles on translation and intercultural communication both nationally and internationally. His book Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators (2004, St. Jerome), is now in its 2nd edition, and is used as a textbook for translators at university level both in Europe and in China, He has also contributed to both the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies (2008), the Routledge Companion to Translation Studies (2008), The Handbook of Translation Studies (Benjamin’s, 2012) and the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics (2012).

This talk focuses on the impact of the context of culture on translation. ET Hall's 'iceberg theory' and triad of culture is introduced together with an NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) logical Levels approach to demonstrate the 3 main types of culture-bound translation issues. This theory is the basis of Translating Cultures. Translation issues relating to the surface of the iceberg are generally culture-bound lexical units. Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg is where the hidden patterns of communication in translation and cultural orientations lie.