英语翻译In addition to the exuberances and deficiencies introduc

英语翻译
In addition to the exuberances and deficiencies introduced by grammatical categories and words that are particular to a given language,another way in which language is inseparable from culture is that much of the meaning we glean from an utterance comes from how those words have been used in the past,what Becker calls prior text.Thus a cowboy movie is about prior cowboy movies more than it is about events that occurred on the American frontier.A viewer who had never before seen a western would miss many layers of meaning that would be obvious to a viewer who had seen many.Memories of prior text are necessary for all but the most rudimentary understanding of a language,and it is this memory – or the lack of it – that is the biggest barrier when speakers talk to each other across cultures.You might say that the reason an American does not realize that Have you eaten yet?is a greeting,not a literal question,and that a Burmese doesn’t realize that How are you?is a greeting,not a literal question,is that they lack the prior text that a native speaker has.
Understanding what is lost and what is added when texts are translated from one language to another reveals a few of the many ways that a language both reflects and creates a world.Similarly,the linguistic elements that vary from one culture to another are the very elements by which language works to create meaning.There is simply no way to speak without making choices about level of loudness,voice quality,words and grammatical structures,how to get the floor,how to frame the words to signal what you think you’re doing when you speak,and so on – and all these choices vary depending on the culture in which the language was learned.That is why it is misleading even to speak of “language and culture”; the very words imply that the two can be separated.