研究生英语阅读教程中高级本UNIT2翻译.doc

Several Languages Called English（几种语言称之为英语）English isnt managing to sweep all else before it-and if ever does become the universal language, many of those who speak it wont understand one another.在此之前，英语不能支配其他的全部，如果当初就成为通用的语言，那么那些说话人也是不能够相互理解的。Much of what will happen to English we can only speculate about. But lets pursue an idea that language researchers regard as fairly well grounded: native speakers of English are already outnumbered by second-language and foreign-language speakers, and will be more heavily outnumbered as time goes on. 关于英语将会发生的许多变化我们仅仅只能作出推测。但是，让我们来追寻被语言研究者们认为是相关的背景：将英语作为第二语言或外语的人，在数量上超过了以英语作为母语的人；并且随着时间的推移，还将超出更多。One obvious implication is that some proportion of the people using English for business or professional purposes around the world arent and neednt be fluent in it. Recently I talked with Michael Henry Heim, a professor of Slavic literatures at the University of California at Los Angeles and a professional translator who has rendered into English major works by Milan Kundera and Gunter Grass. By his count, he speaks ten or so languages. He told me flatly, English is much easier to learn poorly and to communicate in poorly than any other language. Im sure that if Hungary were the leader of the world, Hungarian would not be the world language. To communicate on a day-to-day basis - to order a meal, to book a room - theres no language as simple as English. Research, though, suggests that people are likely to find a language easier or harder to learn according to how similar it is to their native tongue, in terms of things like word order, grammatical structure, and cognate words. As the researcher Terence Odlin noted in his book Language Transfer (1989), the duration of full-time intensive courses given to English-speaking U.S. foreign-service personnel amounts to a rough measurement of how different, in these ways, other languages are from English. Today the courses for foreign-service employees who need to learn German, Italian, French, Spanish, or Portuguese last twenty-four weeks. Those for employees learning Swahili, Indonesian, or Malay last thirty-six weeks, and for people learning languages including Hindi, Urdu, Russian, and Hungarian, forty-four weeks. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean take eighty-eight weeks. Note that all the worlds other commonest native languages except Spanish are in the groups most demanding of English-speakers. It might be reasonable to suppose that the reverse is also true - that Arabic- and Chinese-speakers find fluency in English to be more of a challenge than Spanish-speakers do. 一个显而易见的含义就是：在世界上，一部分人们出于商业和职业的目的而使用英语，他们的英语不流利，也不需要流利。最近我和麦克尔亨利交谈，他是洛杉矶加利福尼亚大学的斯拉乎文学教授，也是一位专职翻译，他曾将米兰和甘特的主要著作翻译成英语。以他的计算，他能说出大约十种语言。他平和地跟我说：“英语较其他语言更能草草地学会，简单交流，我确信，假如匈牙利是这个世界的领导者，匈牙利语也不能成为世界性的语言。在日常基本交流中，如点餐、定房，没有语言象英语一样的简单。”尽管，研究表明人们认为一种语言的简单与困难与否，是根据这种语言相对于其母语的语序、语法结构和同根词语的相似度而言的。根据Terence Odlin的研究在语言的演变一书中提到，为使英语会话及涉外服务人员开设一段时间的全日制强化课程，当作一个粗略的度量，用这种方法来比较英语与其他语言之间的不同。今天，这类为涉外服务人员需要学习德语、意大利语、法语、西班牙语和葡萄牙语设置的课程为期24周。而那些员工学习斯瓦西语、印度尼西亚语或马来语的课程，为期为36周。还有那些学习北印度语、乌尔都语、匈牙利语的则为44周。阿拉伯语、汉语、日语、韩语的则达88周。我们注意到，在世界范围内除了以西班牙语为母语的人们以外，大部分人说英语都比较难。这个反推可能也是正确的，说阿拉伯语和汉语的人们相对与说西班牙语的人们学好流利的英语更富挑战性。A variety of restricted subsets of English have been developed to meet the needs of nonfluent speakers. Among these is Special English, which the Voice of America began using in its broadcasts experimentally some forty years ago and has employed part-time ever since. Special English has a basic vocabulary of just 1,500 words (The American Heritage Dictionary contains some 200,000 words, and the Oxford English Dictionary nearly 750,000), though sometimes these words are used to define non-Special English words that VOA writers deem essential to a given story. Currently VOA uses Special English for news and features that are broadcast a half hour at a time, six times a day, seven days a week, to millions of listeners worldwide. 为适应说不大流利英语的人，各种特定形式的英语得到了发展。慢速英语就是其中之一，它早在40多年前，“美国之音”电台就开始了试验性的广播，并一直用到现在。慢速英语的基本词汇只有1500个单词（美国传统字典里囊括了20万词，牛津英语字典收入将近75万个词），尽管有时这些单词常被用于阐述非慢速英语的词，而这些词对于美国之音的作者讲故事是必要的。因为近来，美国之音利用慢速英语面向的是世界各地数以百万的听众，进行每周7天，每天6次，每次30分的新闻和特写的报道。But restricted forms of English are usually intended for professional communities. Among the best known of these is Seaspeak, which ships pilots around the world have used for the past dozen years or so; this is now being supplanted by SMCP, or Standard Marine Communication Phrases, which is also derived from English but was developed by native speakers of a variety of languages. Airplane pilots and air-traffic controllers use a restricted form of English called Airspeak. 但是，特定形式的英语通常通常供专业团体使用，其中有为大家所熟知的航空用语，它是大约在12年前，在世界范围内飞行员所采用的语言，现在已经被SMCP即标准航空用语所替代。SMCP也是起源于英语，但却是由不同以不同母语的说话使用者那里得到发展的。飞机领航员和空中交通指挥员所使用的特定形式的英语叫做航空语言。Certainly, the worlds ships and airplanes are safer if those who guide them have some language in common, and restricted forms of English have no modern-day rivals for this role. The greatest danger language now seems to pose to navigation and aviation is that some pilots learn only enough English to describe routine situations, and find themselves at a loss when anything out of the ordinary happens. 当然，如果操纵船和飞机的人在采用统一的语言，那么这世界上的船和飞机将更加地安全，而对于这个角色，特定形式的英语在现代具有突出的优势。现在由语言所引起航海和航空的最大的威胁在于，一些领航员只学习了描述航线形式的英语，而出现一些意外情况时就使领航员们感到不知所措了。Something else obviously implied by the ascendance of English as a second and a foreign language is that more and more people who speak English speak another language at least as well, and probably better. India may have the third or fourth largest number of English-speakers in the world, but English is thought to be the mother tongue of much less than one percent of the population. This is bound to affect the way the language is used locally. Browsing some English-language Web sites from India recently, I seldom had trouble understanding what was meant. I did, however, time and again come across unfamiliar words borrowed from Hindi or another indigenous Indian language. On the site called India World the buttons that a user could click on to call up various types of information were labeled samachar: Personalised News, dhan: Investing in India, khoj: Search India, khel: Indian Cricket, and so forth. When I turned to the Afternoon Despatch & Courier of Bombay (some of whose residents call it Mumbai) and called up a gossipy piece about the romantic prospects of the son of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, I read, Sources disclose that before Rahul Gandhi left for London, some kind of a swayamvar was enacted at 10, Janpath with family friend Captain Satish Sharma drawing up a short list of suitable brides from affluent, well-known connected families of Uttar Pradesh. 作为第二语言和外语的英语，它隐藏着非常明显的支配地位，越来越多的人能够很流利的说英语，而且越说越好。在印度说英语的人数在世界上排第三或第四，但是只有1的人是以英语为母语的。这必定影响当地语言的使用方式，最近我浏览印度的英文网站，我似乎有困难去理解它的意思；但是，我却时常发现那些不常用的源自印地语或印度当地的其他一些土语的词。在一个叫印度世界的网站，为了收集各种信息使用者可以点击一些按钮，这些按钮标有“samachar：Personalised News” “dhan：Investing in India”“khoj：Search India” “khel： India Cricket”等许多。当我在看孟买快递下午信使报时，看到关于Gandhui儿子的隐私和浪漫方面的闲话，我读到了这么一句“”Of course, English is renowned for its ability to absorb elements from other languages. As ever more local and national communities use English, though, they will pull language in ever more directions. Few in the world will care to look as far afield as the United States or Britain for their standards of proper English. After all, we long ago gave up looking to England - as did Indians and also Canadians, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders, among others. Today each of these national groups is proud to have its own idioms, and dictionaries to define them. 当然，英语以其吸收其他语言中的成分而著称。由于有更多的地区和全国性的社团在使用英语，英语将向不同的方向推进，世界上很少有国家偏离美式和英式英语的标准，尽管我们很久以前就不注意英格兰，而是重视印度、加拿大、北非、澳大利亚、新西兰等。目前，印度这些国家都为他们自己所有的习语，以及收录它们的词典而感到骄傲。Most of the worlds English-speaking communities can still understand one another well - though not, perhaps, perfectly. As Anne Soukhanov, a word columnist for this magazine and the American editor of the Encarta World English Dictionary, explained in an article titled The Kings English It Aint, published on the Internet last year, Some English words mean very different things, depending on your country. In South Asia, a hotel is a restaurant, but in Australia, a hotel is an establishment selling alcoholic beverages. In South Africa, a robot is a traffic light. 世界上大多数说英语的人们能够很好地理解对方，即使理解不完美、准确。就像SouKhanov杂志的编辑，微软世界