ИСТИНА

Communication and socialization skills are a necessity in contemporary business community. If business professionals are not able to express their ideas clearly, concisely, and appropriately, it will be challenging for them to reach positive agreements while operating internationally. In this context, bilateral trade and economic relations between Kazakhstan and other countries have been growing steadily over the past years. Today, in accordance with latest data Kazakhstan export 970 products to 118 countries carried out about 200 thousand export operations per year. There are 1800 Kazakhstani exporters, 20% of them have a stable export of more than $ 1 million. The quality structure of exports has noticeably improved. Today the share of non-primary products exceeds 30%. For comparison, 5 years ago this share was 24%. Consequently, these international business interactions naturally involve transactions carried out between the representatives of different languages and cultures. This paper focuses on cross-cultural pragmatic failures identified in the collected corpora of 150 business letters written in English by Kazakhstani business professionals to their international partners. A number of cases has been explored which clearly demonstrates noticeable discrepancy between cultural and linguistic contexts of speech units making communication process complicated. In the study, we have discovered reasons for pragmatic failures in communication through business correspondence including a mixture of different cultural standards of the structural and linguistic processing of business letters, a mixture of different genres in one business text with a combination of several communicative purposes, a lack of language skills of the authors of business correspondence in English, etc.