研究生英语阅读教程中高级本UNIT2翻译.docxVIP

Several Languages Called English（几种语言称之为英语） English isn’t managing to sweep all else before it-and if ever does become the universal language, many of those who speak it won’t 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 Ger