Unit4CulturalEncounters課文翻譯綜合教程二

1、Unit 4 Cultural EncountersSusan BassnettWe 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 posta

2、l 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

3、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 meeti

4、ngs 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, wo

5、uld 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 profo

6、und 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 an

7、other 。 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 bor

8、row 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,

9、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 existWhat exactly was th

10、e 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.Compro

11、mising 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 adjustmentsregarding the colour spectrum in the grey / green / blue / brown range,

12、since Englishhas 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 thing

13、s 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 c

14、ultural and linguistic differences 。 This is an essential skill in todays hybrid world, particularly now when the need for international understanding has rarely been so important。 But even as morepeople become multilingual , so native English speakers are losing out , for they are becoming ever mor

15、e 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 culturesmentality and shape language accordingly. Millions of pe

16、ople 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 place

17、d to help that process may not be the ones with the latesttechnology and state of the artmobile phones, but those with the skills to understand what lies in， under and beyondthe words spoken in many different languages 。文化沖突我們生活在一個交流非常便捷的時代。便宜的機票使得我們可以到那些我們的家長只能幻想的地方去， 而網(wǎng)絡(luò)使得我們可以跟最遙遠地方的人們進行交流。在這種情況下，

18、 傳統(tǒng)的郵政現(xiàn)在被戲稱為蝸牛郵件。當學(xué)生們在背包遠足的時候 ，他們可以用電子郵件從喜馬 拉雅的網(wǎng)吧或者從沙漠里的綠洲給他們的家長發(fā)郵件。不管是白天還是晚上，我們也能通過手機來發(fā)短信。所有可以付的起這種方式的人都可以隨時隨地的獲取最新信息。同樣重要的是，全球交流的革命跟英語的普及是不可分割的。英語現(xiàn)在變成領(lǐng)先的國際語言。不管與會者是否是把英語作為母語，全球不管哪個角落的會議和商業(yè)會談都是使用的英語。英語已經(jīng)變成一種促進交流的語言。同時 ，對很多人來說，學(xué)習(xí)英語是他們通往成 功道路上的奠基石。所以你可能會好奇為什么有些人對于這些美好的發(fā)展有所顧忌，為什么英語作為一個國際通用語言會使得有些人對英語的

19、不適應(yīng)？交流上的革命確實存在問題，并且這些問題并不僅僅是經(jīng)濟上的。最根本的東西是，語言和文化之間的不可分割的關(guān)系是一個社會的核 心，而我們忽視了一些最關(guān)鍵的事情。不同的文化不僅僅是給不同組別的人貼上標簽，語言是幫助我們理解世界的工具，每個語言之間都是有區(qū)別的。因為我們通過語言來表達我們的所見所想，而語言是跟文化密切相關(guān)的，所以有時候就可能產(chǎn)生我們能用一種語言表達出來的東西，是不能用另外一種語言來表達出來的.英語的“想家”翻譯成意大利語就變成了 “懷鄉(xiāng)病”，但是英語有時候必須 要用同樣的詞來表示另外一種意思，這種意思不是單純的想家，而是包含了一層渴望的意思在里面.盡管不是同一種意思，英語的想家和懷鄉(xiāng)病放在一起的意思還有所接近的。但是葡萄牙語的 saudade所表達的意思卻是不能用其它語言來翻譯的.這個詞表達的意思不是絕望、憤怒、悲傷或后悔，兒是在以上這些意思之間。早期的圣經(jīng)翻譯者就碰到了有些意思是不可翻譯的這么個問題。比如你要如何把上帝的羔羊的形象翻譯給一個連羊都不存在的人類文明？夏娃從伊甸園拿走的水果具體是什么？如果鯨魚在溫暖的南部海域是不存在的，那么吞掉約拿的生物又是什么 ？面對這些不能克服的語言問題，翻譯家在各語言之間反復(fù)琢磨 ，然后想出了