> How many non-elite Chinese will ever meet a Czech? Almost zero.
Come on, Chris, you know I'm not talking about face-to-face meetings; I'm thinking about building up a strong transnational movement for social change, in which Chinese, Czechs, and everyone else will need to meet, primarily these days, over the Internet. To do this, translation is necessary somehow or other, and good translation costs money. Social change movements have little money, so all too often they suffer with horrible translations. A lot of the French and German Left texts get translated into awful English, primarily because they are done by volunteer amateur would-be translators who don't really have the necessary skills; I'm sure the same thing is true of Russian texts, but I don't know Russian, so I don't have personal knowledge of that.
BTW, on your comment about the insularity of Russians: my son has just gone to the Czech Republic for a few months' stay, and is planning to get an English teaching job. I hope he finds that there are more Czechs interested in studying English than there are Russians interested in the outside world. (Perhaps Russians, like Americans, are so incurious about the outside world because both countries are very big and powerful, so they have been used to throwing their weights around without having to listen to other countries.)
On Thursday, June 3, 2004, at 07:21 AM, Guest wrote:
> many of my students, though
> well travelled and by some measures more cosmopolitan
> than the average US-er, are holding on to remarkably
> racist and chauvinistic attitudes toward "foreign"
> language and culture.
>
> They believe, for instance:
>
> Studying english too much will hurt your chinese.
> Children who grow up bilingual will be confused and
> unable to think clearly.
Very interesting. Apparently the poet in Taiwan who was quoted in the original post was not alone.
The attitude of Japanese people is entirely different, of course; after absorbing basically the entire Chinese vocabulary, plus characters, centuries ago, they have more recently been energetically shoveling English words into their language, without the slightest worry about damaging their Japanese identities, or their ability to think.
> Black people
> are bad english teachers because they 'have an accent'
> and always say 'yo yo yo.'
Now there the Japanese and Chinese apparently stand shoulder to shoulder. When I taught English in Japan back in the late '70s, native English speakers of color often complained that they had a hard time getting jobs because Japanese students tended to assume that you had to be white to speak "correct" English. One fellow who didn't have this problem was a very large, muscular Jamaican fellow in a Berlitz school I worked in; nobody would be inclined to argue with him!
Once I got the bright idea of using a book of Peanuts cartoons as a textbook. I thought the students (we're talking about adult students, of course) would enjoy the humor as they were struggling with the language, but no: they protested that the characters were kids, and they wanted to learn "adult" English.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit, 'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet; Nor ever ever shall, until that I die, For the longer I live the more fool am I. -- Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melancholy (1684)