Preservance
Posted by anuska072 on February 16, 2010
The world is becoming smaller and smaller. We have the Internet; a library of international news, happenings, and trends making everything evolve faster than ever. The cultural differences are becoming smaller; with the globalization and cultural pluralism, expansionism, and the Coca Cola syndrome we are slowly converging into one set of rules. Of course, the literal notion of this is far away, but not that far.
Evolvement of language is continuous; many immigrant communities are mixing their mother tongue with English creating Spanglish, Franglish, Serblish, and others. With such being said, an interpreter should continuously be informed on connotations and meanings of these ‘new world’ words. Even immigrant communities in different regions of the United States have different accents and slang. For an interpreter and possibly a member of a particular immigrant community, education on the new terms and its meanings is gained through simple interaction and an interest of how the dynamic of immigrant communities is evolving.
Some may say that immigrants are just adapting to their surroundings, while others argue that these are the exact manners of how cultures disappear. Perhaps it varies on how one observes culture. For instance, the French are concerned that only 11% of the documents in 2005 of the EU were written in French, versus 44% in 1998; feeling that their language is endangered by westernization and overbearance of English. Still there is the fact that most of Africa and some Middle East speak French because they were colonized, not because they chose to. Urbanization and westernization of even most remote places of this Earth threatens to extinguish rare languages, and those are a part of someone’s culture. How do we preserve that?
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