英语全球化的功与过_BEC初级作文_BEC初级-查字典英语网

英语全球化的功与过

In a fascinating piece written for the New York Review of Books last June, the novelist Tim Parks described his suspicion that world authors today write with an eye to the translatability of their work into English. They "had already performed a translation within their own languages", he writes. Mr Parks was grateful for the directness this produced, but worried it came at a price in literary variety. Global English allows writers to go "not quite as far but in half the time", as the old Cure song used to have it.

小说家蒂姆•帕克斯(Tim Parks)去年6月为《纽约书评》(New York Review of Books)撰写了一篇颇有意思的文章，他在文章中谈到了自己的一点怀疑：世界各国的作家如今在写作时都会考虑，自己的作品是否容易译成英语。帕克斯在文中指出，作家们“在成文时实际上是在用母语翻译英语版的内容。”这样做能使文章译成英语后通俗易懂，对此帕克斯予以了肯定，但他担心这会牺牲文学的多样性。就像《The Cure》乐队的那支老歌所唱的，全球性的英语让作家虽然“走得没那么远，但用时却减少了一半”。

The writer Robert McCrum wrote in his recent book Globish that there are 4bn people who understand English, if we're generous about what we mean by English. One can only rub one's eyes. Anyone who is now 38 years old or older was alive at a time when 4bn was more than the whole population of the planet. It reached that level in 1974, just seven years before Fran•ois Mitterrand came to power in France. His culture minister, Jack Lang, waged a fight against the linguistic imperialism of English. A later government would specify that 40 per cent of popular songs on the radio had to be in French. That law gave rise to a lot of laughter in Washington and London. It doesn't seem quite so crazy as it did back then.