(完整版)Unit4CulturalEncounters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