Cultural Awareness in Higher Education: A Contrastive Study of Language and Technical Students’ Perceptions

Cultural awareness is an extremely important skill in nowadays multicultural and globalized society. It should be acquired at an early age and continuously developed throughout the lifespan. Little research has been carried out on diagnosing students’ cultural awareness. The present study aims to contribute to the topic and shed more light on it by investigating the importance of cultural awareness from the perspective of the students at the Politehnica University Timişoara. It compares two different representative samples of students, one studying translation and interpreting and, the other, computer engineering, and their perceptions of cultural awareness, based on a set of questions starting from a critical incident involving culture. The students’ answers were collected in June 2024 online and anonymously. Even though the expectations were that the Translation and Interpreting students would show a higher level of perception regarding cultural awareness than the Automation and Computing students, due to the nature of their training, the results have shown quite similar percentages. Both groups of students based their answer on their native culture, indicated a relatively high level of perception regarding cultural awareness in recognizing and accepting major cultural differences between cultures and expressed a high interest in increasing their sociocultural knowledge. Moreover, the items addressed only to the Translation and Interpreting students demonstrated, as expected, that they are completely aware of the necessity of cultural ability and sociocultural knowledge in their training. All in all, the students’ high level of perception regarding cultural awareness is encouraging for the educational process and for the training of professionals.