howdo you translate the image of the Lamb of God for a culture in which sheep do not exist?What exactly was the fruit that Eve pick in the Garden of Eden?What was the creature that swallowed Jonah,given that whales are not given to swimming in warm,southern seas?Faced with unsurmountable linguistic problems,translators negotiated the boundaries between languages and came up with a compromise.
Compromising is something that speakers of more than one language understand.When there are no words in another language for what you want to say,you make adjustments and tyr to approximate.English and Welsh speakers make adjustments regarding the colour spectrum in the grey/green/brown range,since English has four words and Welsh has three.And even where words do exist,compromises still need to be made.The word''democracy''means completely different things in different contexts,and even a word like ''bread''which refers to a stsple food item made of flour means toyally different things to different people.The flat breads of Central Asia are a long way away from Mother'sPride white sliced toasties,yet the word ''bread''has to serve for both.
Inevitably,the spread of English means that millions of people are adding another language to their own and are learning how to negotiate cultural and linguistic differences.This is an essential skill in today'shybrid world,particularly now when the need for international understanding has rarely been so important.But even as more people become multilingual,and hence increasingly unawre of the differences between cultures that languages reveal.Communicating in another language involves not only linguistic skills,but the ability to think differently,to enter into another culture's mentality and shape language accordingly.Millions of people are discovering how to bridge cultures ,while the English-speakingworld becomes ever more complacent and cuts down on foreign language learning programmers in the mistaken belief that it is enough to kno English.
world peace in the future depends on intercultural understanding.Those best placed help that process may not be the ones with the lastest technology and state of the art mobil phone,but those with the skills to understand what lies in,under and beyond the words spoken in many different language.求自己翻译的