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Unit 4 Cultural Encounters
Susan Bassnett
We
live
in
an
age
of
easy
access
to
the
rest
of
the
world.
Cheap
flights
mean
that
millions of people are able to visit
places their parents could only dream about, while
the
Internet enables us to communicate
with the remotest places and the traditional
postal
services
are
now
referred
to
almost
mockingly
as
mail.
When
students
go
off
back-packing, they can email their
parents from Internet cafes in the Himalayas or
from a
desert oasis. And as for mobile
phones
—
the clicking of
text messaging at any hour of the
day
or night has become familiar to us all. Everyone,
it seems, provided, of course, they
can
afford to do so, need never be out of touch.
Significantly also, this great global
communications revolution is also linked to the
expansion
of
English,
which
has
now
become
the
leading
international
language.
Conferences
and
business
meetings
around
the
globe
are
held
in
English,
regardless
of
whether
anyone
present
is
a
native
English
speaker.
English
has
simply
become
the
language
that
facilitates
communication,
and
for
many
people
learning
English
is
an
essential stepping stone on the road to
success.
So why, you may wonder, would
anyone have misgivings about all these wonderful
developments,
and
why
does
the
rise
of
English
as
a
global
language
cause
feelings
of
uneasiness
for
some
of
us?
For
there
are
indeed
problems
with
the
communications
revolution,
problems
that
are
not
only
economic.
Most
fundamental
is
the
profound
relationship between language and
culture that lies at the heart of society and one
that we
overlook at our peril.
Different
cultures
are
not
simply
groups
of
people
who
label the
world
differently;
languages give us the means to shape
our views of the world and languages are different
from
one
another.
We
express
what
we
see
and
feel
through
language,
and
because
languages
are
so
clearly
culture-related,
often
we
find
that
what
we
can
say
in
one
language
cannot
be
expressed
at
all
in
another.
The
English
word
translates
into
Italian
as
but
English has
had
to
borrow
that
same
word
to
describe a different
state of mind, something that is not quite
homesickness and involves
a kind of
longing. Homesickness and nostalgia put together
are almost, but not quite, the
Portuguese
despair,
angst
(English
borrowed
that
from
German),
sadness
or
regret,
but
hovers
somewhere in and
around all those words.
The early Bible
translators hit the problem of untranslatability
head-on. How do you
translate the image
of the Lamb of God for a culture in which sheep do
not exist? What
exactly was
the fruit that Eve picked in the Garden of Eden?
What was the creature that
swallowed
Jonah, given that whales are not given to swimming
in warm, southern seas?
Faced
with
unsurmountable
linguistic
problems,
translators
negotiated
the
boundaries
between languages and came up with a
compromise.
Compromising
is
something
that
speakers
of
more
than
one
language
understand.
When
there
are
no
words
in
another
language
for
what
you
want
to
say,
you
make
adjustments
and
try
to
approximate.
English
and
Welsh
speakers
make
adjustments
regarding the
colour spectrum in the grey / green / blue / brown
range, since English has
four words and
Welsh has three. And even where words do exist,
compromises still need
to
be
made.
The
word
means
completely
different
things
in
different
contexts, and even a word like
means
totally
different
things
to
different
people.
The
flat
breads
of
Central
Asia
are
a
long
way
away
from
Mother's
Pride
white
sliced
toasties,
yet
the
word
has
to
serve for both.
Inevitably,
the spread of English means that millions of
people are adding another
language
to
their
own
and
are
learning
how
to
negotiate
cultural
and
linguistic
differences. This
is an essential skill in today's hybrid world,
particularly now when the
need
for
international
understanding
has
rarely
been
so
important.
But
even
as
more
people
become
multilingual,
so
native
English
speakers
are
losing
out,
for
they
are
becoming
ever
more
monolingual,
and
hence
increasingly
unaware
of
the
differences
between cultures
that languages reveal. Communicating in another
language involves not
only
linguistic
skills,
but
the
ability
to
think
differently,
to
enter
into
another
culture's
mentality
and
shape
language
accordingly.
Millions
of
people
are
discovering
how
to
bridge
cultures,
while
the
English-speaking
world
becomes
ever
more
complacent
and
cuts
down
on
foreign
language
learning
programmes
in
the
mistaken
belief
that
it
is
enough to know English.
World peace in the future depends on
intercultural understanding. Those best placed
to help that process may not be the
ones with the latest
technology and
state of the art
mobile phones, but
those with the skills to understand what lies in,
under and beyond the
words spoken in
many different languages.
文化冲突
我们生活在一个交流非常便捷的时
代。
便宜的机票使得我们可以到那些我们的家长只能
幻想的地方
去
,
而网络使得我们可以跟最遥远地方的人们进行交流。在这
种情况下
,
传统的