跨文化交际课后翻译原文1--8单元

Translation1

The growth of intercultural communication as a field of study is based on a view of history that clearly demonstrates people and cultures have been troubled by a persistent inability to understand and get along with groups and societies removed by space, ideology, appearance, and behavior from their own. What is intriguing about many of human civilization ’s failure is that they appear to be personal as well as global. The story of humankind is punctuated with instances of face-to-face conflicts as well as international misunderstanding--major and minor quarrels that range from simple name-calling to isolationism tr even armed conflict. It is obvious that increases contact with other cultures and subcultures make it imperative for us to make a concerted effort to understand and get along with people whose beliefs and backgrounds may be vastly different from our own. The ability, through increased awareness and understanding, to peacefully coexist with people who do not necessarily share our lifestyles or values could benefit us not only in our own neighborhoods but could be the decisive factor in maintaining would peace.

Translation 2

Culture is something referred to as our mental programming, our “software of the mind. ” But we can take that computer analogy further and say that culture is the operating environment that enables software programs to run. Culture is like DOS or Unix or Windows:it is what enables us to process information in various specific applications. The metaphor of windows seems to be very appealing to describe culture ：culture is a mental set of windows through which all of life is viewed. It varies from individual to individual within a society, but it shares important characteristics with members of a society. Culture is like the water fish swim in--a reality that is taken for granted and rarely examined. It is in the air we breathe and is as necessary to our understanding of who we are as air is to our physical life. Culture is the property of a community people, not simply a characteristic of individuals. Societies are programmed by culture, and that programming comes from similar life experiences and similar interpretations of what those experiences mean. If culture is mental programming, it is also a mental map of reality. It tells us from early childhood what matters, what o prefer, what to avoid, and what to do. Culture also tells us what ought to be . It gives us assumptions about the ideal beyond what individuals may experience. It helps us in setting priorities. It establishes codes for behavior and provides justification and legitimization for that behavior.

Translation 3

Although each of us has a unique set of values, there also are values that tend to permeate a culture. These are called cultural values. Cultural values generally are normative in that they inform a member of a culture what is good and bad, right and false, positive and negative, and the like. Cultural values define what is worthwhile to die for, what is worth protecting, what frightens people and their social systems, what are considered proper subjects for study and for ridicule, and what types of events lead individuals to group solidarity. Cultural values also specify what behaviors are of importance and which should be avoided within a culture. Values represent a learned organization of rules for making choices and for resolving conflicts. The values held by participants in intercultural communication are important because values develop standards and guidelines that establish appropriate and inappropriate behaviors in a society. Values, in other words, help determine how people ought to behave with the result that people will exhibit and expect behaviors according to their value systems. To the extent that cultural value systems differ, we may expect that intercultural communication participants will tend to exhibit and to expect different under similar circumstance.

Translation 4

When we say that language is always ambiguous, what we mean is that we can never fully control the meaning of the things we say and write. The meanings we exchange by speaking and by writing are not given in the words and sentences alone but are also constructed partly out of what our listeners and our readers interpret them to mean. To put this quite another way, meaning in language is jointly constructed by the participants in communication. Language is inherently ambiguous. It means that in order to communicate we must always jump to conclusions about what other mean. There is no way around this. When someone says something, w must jump to some conclusion about what he or she means. We draw inferences based on two main sources. 1, the language they have used, and 2, our knowledge about the world. The knowledge includes expectations about what people would normally say in such circumstances. Language is ambiguous. This means that we can never be certain what the other person means--whether in speaking or writing. To put it another way, language can never fully express our meanings. But what does this mean for intercultural communication? In the first place it should be clear that communication works better the more the participants share assumptions and knowledge about the world. Where two people have very similar histories, backgrounds, and experiences, their communication works fairly easily because the inferences each makes about what the other means will be based on common experience and knowledge. Two people from the same village and the same family are likely to make fewer mistakes in drawing inferences about what the other means than two people from different cities on different sides of the earth.

Translation 5

Where any two people differ in group membership because they are of different genders, different ages, different ethnic or culture groups, different educations, different parts of the same country or even city, different income or occupational groups, or with very different personal histories, each will find it more difficult to draw inferences about what the other person means.

In the contemporary world of international and intercultural communication, the differences between people are considerable. People are in daily contact with members of cultures and other groups from all around the world. Successful communication is based on sharing as much as possible the assumptions we make about what others mean. When we are communicating with people who are very different from us, it is very difficult to know how ti draw inferences about what they mean, and so it is impossible to depend on shared knowledge and background for confidence in our interpretation.

It has been found that men and women from the same culture, even from the sane families, often misunderstand each other because of different assumptions they make about the purposes or goals of their communication. A man may wish to make a woman happy by giving her a gift of something she really wants. He asks her what she would like to have for her birthday--- she can ask for anything. Unfortunately, what she wants more than anything else is for him to know intuitively what she would like to have. Men and women, at least in North American society, tend to differ in their concern for explicitness or for indirection. A woman is likely to think it is important for someone to show how well he knows her by not having to ask explicitly what she wants. A man in that situation, however, feels beast about the situation if he is told quiet directly and explicitly how he can make her happy.

Translation 6

Non-verbal communication might be thought of as any form of communication which is not directly dependent on the use of language. Generally speaking, however, it is very difficult to know where to separate verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. Such non-verbal aspects of communication as nodding the head most often accompany speech and are part and parcel of the verbal system of language use. On the other hand such forms of communication as dance and music often have no verbal component at all. What we want to here is simply to call attention to the fact that many aspects of human interaction depend upon forms of communication which can not be easily transcribed into words and yet are crucial to our understanding to each other.

Of course we have to emphasize the importance of communication in speaking and writing, and yet we should also realize that much much communication also takes place without the use of words. The way a person dresses for a meeting may suggestion to other participants how he or she is prepared to participate in it. In fact, we can use virtually any aspect of our behavior or our presentation which others can perceive as means of communication.

Translation 7

Many people today want to do many things within so little time. The sense o time might be called time urgency, it is a syndrome of behavior in which the persons continually tries to accomplish more than can be humanly accomplished. Until very recently, time urgency was thought to be a characteristics of Americans, particularly American males in the generation born in the period from the Great Depression through to the end of the World War .

It should be obvious that that this sense of time urgency is no longer a cultural characteristic of just this one generation of American males. It is a characteristic of the Asian “salary man”, and is spreading throughout the world rapidly as one aspect of the internationalization of business.

One of the most important effects of this sense of time is that in communication it will almost produce a negative evaluation to the slower participants by the faster participants. Those who share in this concept of time urgency will come to see anyone who moves more slowly than they do as conservative, as uncooperative, as resistant to change, and as opposing progress. Behind the concept of time urgency is the idea that what lies ahead in the future is always better than what lies behind in the past; it based solidly on the belief in progress.

Translation 8

If we accept the belief that our past influences our view of reality and the corresponding tenet that each of us may have similar but not identical personal histories, then it should follow that another person’s picture of the universe will not be exactly like ours. Yet most of us act as if our way of perceiving things is the correct and only way. We often overwork perceptual differences and conclude that if the other person doesn’t see that Pablo Picasso is the greatest artist that ever lived, he simply does not art. Actually, it may well be that he has a different past history and what is great art for him may not match our perception of art.

In our daily activities these differences in perception appear between different groups. Various generations, minorities, occupation and cultures have conflicting values and goals that will influence their orientation and interpretation of reality.

Our culture is a major of factor in perceptual discrepancies. Culture helps supply us with our perceptive of reality. It therefore plays a dominant role in intercultural communication. Our cultures tell us, in a variety of ways, how to judge others and what to use as criteria for those judgments. The danger of such evaluations is that they are often false, misleading, and arbitrary. It is truly a naive view of the world to believe and behave as if we an our culture have discovered the true and only set of norms.