剑桥雅思4 Lost for Words 翻译-Test 2-Passage 1

在网上买了Cambridge Enlish教材，剑桥雅思4 Lost for Words 翻译，开始看Cambridge Enlish这些教材时好多单词不认识，只好在手机上安装app一个一个单词的查，笔者开始看这个教材时没有按照顺序看，拿着剑桥雅思4书就开始了。

但看到阅读时，一是太长，二是好多单词不认识，于是为了加深理解，将教材自已用 google 翻译出来放这，帮助有需要的人。

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剑桥雅思4 Lost for Words 翻译-Test 2-Passage 1

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剑桥雅思4 Lost for Words 翻译-Test 2-Passage 1

剑桥雅思4 Lost for Words 翻译

剑桥雅思4 Lost for Words 翻译 Test 2 Passage 1这篇文章介绍了少数民族语言所面临的危机。虽然文章段落比较多，但实际上就说了三件事情：语言消失的原因，为什么要保护语言，以及一些保护语言的方案。以下是剑桥雅思4 Lost for Words 翻译-Test 2-Passage 1中文翻译：

In the Native American Navajo nation, which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-aged or elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in English. Street signs, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time.

在遍布美国西南部四个州的美洲原住民纳瓦霍民族中，本地语言正在消亡。它的大多数人（说本地语言的人）是中年或老年人。尽管许多学生在纳瓦霍上课，但学校是用英语开办的。路牌、超市商品甚至他们自己的报纸都是英文的。毫不奇怪，语言学家怀疑任何以纳瓦霍语为母语的人会在一百年后仍然存在。

Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations – that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before has the planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. At the moment, we are heading for about three or four languages dominating the world,’ says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. ‘It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult to know.’

纳瓦霍人并不孤单。世界上 6,800 种语言中有一半可能会在两代人之内消失——也就是说每十天就会消失一种语言。地球上的语言多样性从未以如此之快的速度萎缩。目前，我们正朝着主导世界的三四种语言前进，”雷丁大学的进化生物学家 Mark Pagel 说。 “这是一次大灭绝，我们是否会从损失中恢复过来很难知道。”

Isolation breeds linguistic diversity: as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people. Only 250 languages have more than a million speakers, and at least 3,000have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000speakers. What makes a language endangered is not just the number of speakers, but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Center, in Fairbanks.

隔离/孤立孕育了语言的多样性：因此，世界上充斥着只有少数人使用的语言。只有 250 种语言的使用人数超过一百万，而至少 3,000 种语言的使用人数少于 2,500。即将消失的不一定是这些小语言。尽管有 150,000 名使用者，但纳瓦霍人仍被视为濒临灭绝。使一种语言濒临灭绝的原因不仅在于说话者的数量，还在于他们的年龄。如果是小孩子说的话，还是比较安全的。费尔班克斯阿拉斯克母语中心主任迈克尔克劳斯说，极度濒危的语言是那些只有老年人才说的语言。

Why do people reject the language of their parents? It begins with a crisis of confidence when a small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealthier society, says Nicholas Ostler, of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath. ‘People lose faith in their culture,’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old traditions.’

为什么人们拒绝父母的语言？位于巴斯的英国濒危语言基金会的尼古拉斯·奥斯特勒（Nicholas Ostler）说，这始于一场信任危机，当时一个小社区发现自己与一个更大、更富裕的社会并肩作战。 “人们对自己的文化失去信心，”他说。 “当下一代达到十几岁时，他们可能不想被诱导进入旧传统。”

The change is not always voluntary Quite often, governments try to kill off a minority language by banning its use in public or discouraging its use in schools, all to promote national unity The former US policy of running Indian reservation schools in English, for example, effectively put languages such as Navajo on the danger list. But Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the Linguistics Department at the University of Chicago, argues that the deadliest weapon is not government policy but economic globalisation. ‘Native Americans have not lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic pressures,’ he says. ‘They cannot refuse to speak English if most commercial activity is in English.’ But are languages worth saving? At the very least, there is a loss of data for the study of languages and their evolution, which relies on comparisons between languages, both living and dead. When an unwritten and unrecorded language disappears, it is lost to science.

这种改变并不总是自愿的很多时候，政府试图通过禁止在公共场合使用或不鼓励在学校使用来消灭少数民族语言，所有这些都是为了促进民族团结美国以前用英语开办印第安保留学校的政策，例如，有效地将诸如纳瓦霍语之类的语言列入危险清单。但芝加哥大学语言学系主任 Salikoko Mufwene 认为，最致命的武器不是政府政策，而是经济全球化。 “美洲原住民并没有失去对自己语言的自豪感，但他们不得不适应社会经济压力，”他说。 “如果大多数商业活动都是用英语进行的，他们就不能拒绝说英语。”但是语言值得保存吗？至少，研究语言及其演变的数据丢失了，这依赖于语言之间的比较，包括活的和死的。当一种未成文和未记录的语言消失时，它就被科学迷失了。

Language is also intimately bound up with culture, so it may be difficult to preserve one without the other. ‘If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something,’ Mufwene says. ‘Moreover, the loss of diversity may also deprive us of different ways of looking at the world,’ says Pagel. There is mounting evidence that learning a language produces physiological changes in the brain. ‘Your brain and mine are different from the brain of someone who speaks French, for instance,’ Pagel says, and this could affect our thoughts and perceptions. ‘The patterns and connections we make among various concepts may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community.’

语言也与文化密切相关，因此如果没有另一种，可能很难保存其中的一种。 “如果一个人从纳瓦霍语转向英语，他们就会失去一些东西，”穆夫文说。 “此外，多样性的丧失也可能剥夺我们看待世界的不同方式，”Pagel 说。越来越多的证据表明，学习一门语言会在大脑中产生生理变化。 “例如，你和我的大脑与说法语的人的大脑不同，”Pagel 说，这可能会影响我们的思想和感知。 “我们在各种概念之间建立的模式和联系可能是由我们社区的语言习惯构成的。”

So despite linguists’ best efforts, many languages will disappear over the next century. But a growing interest in cultural identity may prevent the direst predictions from coming true. ‘The key to fostering diversity is for people to learn their ancestral tongue, as well as the dominant language,’ says Doug Whalen, founder and president of the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. ‘Most of these languages will not survive without a large degree of bilingualism,’ he says. In New Zealand, classes for children have slowed the erosion of Maori and rekindled interest in the language. A similar approach in Hawaii has produced about 8,000new speakers of Polynesian languages in the past few years. In California, ‘apprentice’ programmes have provided life support to several indigenous languages. Volunteer ‘apprentices’ pair up with one of the last living speakers of a Native American tongue to learn a traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instruction exclusively in the endangered language. After about 300 hours of training they are generally sufficiently fluent to transmit the language to the next generation. But Mufwene says that preventing a language from dying out is not the same as giving it new life by using it every day. ‘Preserving a language is more like preserving fruits in ajar,’ he says.

因此，尽管语言学家尽了最大努力，但许多语言将在下个世纪消失。但对文化身份日益增长的兴趣可能会阻止最可怕的预测成为现实。康涅狄格州纽黑文濒危语言基金的创始人兼总裁道格·惠伦说：“促进多样性的关键是让人们学习他们的祖先语言以及主要语言。” “如果没有大量的双语，这些语言中的大多数将无法生存，”他说。在新西兰，儿童班减缓了毛利语的侵蚀，重新点燃了对毛利语的兴趣。在过去的几年里，夏威夷的类似方法已经产生了大约 8,000 名新的波利尼西亚语使用者。在加利福尼亚，“学徒”计划为几种土著语言提供了生命支持。志愿者“学徒”与最后一位使用美洲原住民语言的人结对，学习传统技能，如编织篮子，并专门用濒临灭绝的语言进行指导。经过大约 300 小时的培训后，他们通常能够流利地将语言传给下一代。但 Mufwene 说，防止一种语言消亡与通过每天使用它来赋予它新的生命是不同的。 “保存语言更像是保存半开的水果，”他说。

However, preservation can bring a language back from the dead. There are examples of languages that have survived in written form and then been revived by later generations. But a written form is essential for this, so the mere possibility of revival has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems of writing where none existed before.

但是，保存可以使语言起死回生。有一些语言以书面形式幸存下来，然后被后代复兴的例子。但是书面形式对此至关重要，因此仅仅复兴的可能性就导致许多濒危语言的使用者开发出以前不存在的书写系统。