In our contemporary world, with its much more functional idea of translation, it indeed makes sense to suppose that the knowledge of given concrete situations and expectations is an underlying condition for communication, and that intercultural communication, including translation, largely depends on the world knowledge of the target audience. In such an explanation, "similarities" make sense again. From a scholarly point of view, and probably also from the pragmatic point of view of translators and, for example, business people - in the case of business communication, the concrete items transferred from a given "source" audience to one or more target audiences will probably not allow for communication from the moment the common framework and the position of the items familiar to the partners involved are not guaranteed.