Unit 4 Cultural Encounters课文翻译综合教程二

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.

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, 他们可以用电子邮件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。因为我们通过语言来表达我们的所见所想, 而语言是跟文化密切相关的, 所以有时候就可能产生我们能用一种语言表达出来的东西, 是不能用另外一种语言来表达出来的。英语的"想家"翻译成意大利语就变成了"怀乡病", 但是英语有时候必须要用同样的词来表示另外一种意思, 这种意思不是单纯的想家, 而是包含了一层渴望的意思在里面。尽管不是同一种意思, 英语的想家和怀乡病放在一起的意思还有所接近的。但是葡萄牙语的 "saudade"所表达的意思却是不能用其它语言来翻译的。这个词表达的意思不是绝望、愤怒、悲伤或后悔, 儿是在以上这些意思之间。

早期的圣经翻译者就碰到了有些意思是不可翻译的这么个问题。比如你要如何把上帝的羔羊的形象翻译给一个连羊都不存在的人类文明? 夏娃从伊甸园拿走的水果具体是什么? 如果鲸鱼在温暖的南部海域是不存在的, 那么吞掉约拿的生物又是什么? 面对这些不能克服的语言问题, 翻译家在各语言之间反复琢磨, 然后想出了一个折中的方案。

这个折中的方案是用不同种语言交流的人们都能理解的说法。当你想表达的单词在另外一种语言里不存在的时候, 你要想办法来调整接近原来单词的意思。说英语的和讲威尔士语的在灰, 绿, 蓝, 棕表达光谱的单词上进行了一些调整。因为英语能表达出这四个单词而威尔士语只能表达出其中的三个。尽管各语言之间意思相同的单词确实存在, 有时候仍然要使用折中的方案。"民主"这个词在不同的背景下表达出来的意思是完全不一样的, 连像面包这种词汇对不同人的意思都是完全不同的, 面包指的是那些主要原材料是面粉的食品。中亚的扁面包和"母亲骄傲"的烤面包是完全不一样的食品, 面包这个单词却要同时包含这两种食物。

    不可避免的, 英语的广泛传播意味着数百万人需要学习另外一种语言, 并且要学会如何识别文化的区别和语言上的区别。这项技能在现在的混合社会里尤其重要, 尤其是在这个国际之间的理解如此重要的时代。当越来越多的人们掌握了多种语言, 以英语为母语的人却正在失去优势, 因为他们已经变成只会一种语言的人, 所以他们不可能知道文化所产生的语言上的差别。用另外一种语言来交流不仅仅是使用语言技能, 也包括要能使用另外一种文化的思维方式, 来组织自己的语言。当数百万的人正在探索如何缩小文化之间的差距时, 以英语为母语的社会却变的越来越自满, 并且开始删减外语课, 因为他们相信会说英语就足够了。

    在将来, 世界和平需要各文化之间的互相理解。那些最能促进这种互相理解的人可能并不是那些掌握最新技术, 和最新科技水平的手机的人。相反, 这些人一定是那些具有理解不同语言所表达的意思的人。