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 "snail 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 "homesickness" translates into Italian as "nostalgia," 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 "saudade," an untranslatable word that describes a state of mind that is not 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 "democracy" means completely different things in different contexts, and even a word like "bread" which refers to a staple food item made of flour 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 "bread" 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.
expressed翻译文化冲突
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, 传统的邮政现在被戏称为"蜗牛邮件"。当学生们在背包远足的时候, 他们可以用从喜马拉雅的网吧或者从沙漠里的绿洲给他们的家长发邮件。不管是白天还是晚上, 我们也能通过手机来发短信。所有可以付的起这种方式的人都可以随时随地的获取最新信息。
同样重要的是, 全球交流的革命跟英语的普及是不可分割的。英语现在变成领先的国际语言。不管与会者是否是把英语作为母语, 全球不管哪个角落的会议和商业会谈都是使用的英语。英语已经变成一种促进交流的语言。同时, 对很多人来说, 学习英语是他们通往成功道路上的奠基石。
所以你可能会好奇为什么有些人对于这些美好的发展有所顾忌, 为什么英语作为一个国际通用语言会使得有些人对英语的不适应? 交流上的革命确实存在问题, 并且这些问题并不仅仅是经济上的。最根本的东西是, 语言和文化之间的不可分割的关系是一个社会的核心, 而我们忽视了一些最关键的事情。
不同的文化不仅仅是给不同组别的人贴上标签, 语言是帮助我们理解世界的工具, 每个语言之间都是有区别的。因为我们通过语言

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