The American International Health Alliance, a national not‐for‐profit healthcare organization initiated in 1992, uses Internet technologies to aid in the exchange of medical information between healthcare providers in the U.S. and their colleagues in Eastern Europe and the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union. A major role in the exchange is played by Information Coordinators—physicians, nurses, or administrators in the partnership institutions in the region. Through a questionnaire distributed during a training session in the U.S. and e‐mail exchanges, we interviewed these Information Coordinators to learn how Internet technologies are being introduced, disseminated, and adopted in their institutions. We then applied Everett Rogers's theory of the diffusion of innovations to help interpret their responses. Although now only in its preliminary stages, this study shows that technical communicators must be aware of the cultural influences—economic, political, ethnic, and institutional—that accompany technology as they communicate about such innovations across borders of culture, expertise, and ideology.

Understanding the relationship between culture and language has become a requisite for successful business enterprises in the developing global economy. Cultural conventions inform language, often creating differences in the content, organizational pattern, presentation of argument, style, and format of business documents. Differences in conventions can lead to readers' misinterpretation or failure to understand a message. International business communication is evolving along with the global economy in four distinct patterns: as a hybridized language, as a business interlanguage, as a multiconventional language, and as an international language. The present workforce and those about to enter it need to become sensitized to the effects of multicultural conventions on their business communication.

The workplace is becoming increasingly diverse in ways that are changing our understanding of who our readers are and how we can make effective communication choices to bridge the gaps between us. Communication problems arise because of differences in world experience, in the amount of common knowledge shared within cultures, in the structure of societies and the workplace, in culturally specific rhetorical strategies, and even in differences in processing graphics. Most textbooks provide little information on these topics, so the technical writing teacher needs to find ways to incorporate issues of international and multicultural communication into the classroom.