Unit 4 Cultural Encounters课文翻译综合教程二.pdfVIP

Unit 4 Cultural Encounters Susan Bassnett We live in an age o easy access to the rest o 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 o 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 a ord to do so, need never be out of touch. Significantly also, this great global communications revolution is also linked to the expansion o English, which has now become the leading international language. Conferences and business meetings around the globe are held in English, regardless o 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 o English as a global language cause feelings o uneasiness for some o 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. Di erent cultures are not simply groups o people who label the world di erently; languages give us the means to shape our views of the world and