Abstract: This paper is concerned with the possibility of applying rhetoric as an approach and a tool for mediating cultural gaps in understanding that are based on existential sets of values expressed in culturally-significant texts of a language. It is not the choice of words but the choice of the meanings these words are involved with that makes it possible to relate rhetoric to  epistemology and next – to semantics. A rhetoric of meanings is concerned with the deliberate choice of wording and the ethos that guides that choice in overcoming cultural gaps that most of the time are based on asynchronies in speech patterns.  My concern is not the English tongue. My only concern is the expression of our Bulgarian cultural Self into English-based spaces of our global existence.  Not the transcended Self, but the translated one, that needs the words of speech in order to tell our own story so that people can access it. It is like programming a universal culture-compatibility key – a reader of meanings based on rhetoric knowledge.

Keywords: rhetoric, rhetoric of meaning, rhetorical knowledge, translation, universal culture-compatibility key,

Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 4, April 2012,  http://rhetoric.bg/, ISSN 1314-4464

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