2. 外语
  3. "You understand grandmother when she talks to you, don’t you, darling?" The girl nods. Johnson, the reporter, met her—and her Da

"You understand grandmother when she talks to you, don’t you, darling?" The girl nods. Johnson, the reporter, met her—and her Da

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问题     "You understand grandmother when she talks to you, don’t you, darling?" The girl nods. Johnson, the reporter, met her—and her Danish mother and English father—at the airport, enroute to Denmark. The parents were eager to discuss their experience of bringing up their daughter bilingually in London. It isn’t easy: the husband does not speak Danish, so the child hears the language only from her mother, who has come to accept that she will reply in English.
    This can be painful. Not sharing your first language with loved ones is hard. Not passing it on to your own child can be especially tough. Many expat and immigrant parents feel a sense of failure; they wring their hands and share stories on parenting forums and social media, hoping to find the secret to nurturing bilingual children successfully.
    Children are linguistic sponges, but this doesn’t mean that cursory exposure is enough. They must hear a language quite a bit to understand it—and use it often to be able to speak it comfortably. This is mental work, and a child who doesn’t have a motive to speak a language—either a need or a strong desire—will often avoid it. Children’s brains are already busy enough.
    So languages often wither and die when parents move abroad. In the past, governments discouraged immigrant families from keeping their languages. Teddy Roosevelt worried that America would become a "polyglot boarding-house". These days, officials tend to be less interventionist; some even see a valuable resource in immigrants’ language abilities. Yet many factors conspire to ensure that children still lose their parents’ languages, or never learn them.
    A big one is institutional pressure. A child’s time spent with a second language is time not spent on their first. So teachers often discourage parents from speaking their languages to their children. (This is especially true if the second language lacks prestige.) Parents often reluctantly comply, worried about their offspring’s education. This is a shame; children really can master two languages or even more. Research does indeed suggest their vocabulary in each language may be somewhat smaller for a while. But other studies hint at cognitive advantages among bilinguals. They may be more adept at complex tasks, better at maintaining attention, and (at the other end of life) suffer the onset of dementia later.
    Even without those side-effects, though, a bilingual child’s connection to relatives and another culture is a good thing in itself. How to bring it about? Sabine Little, a German linguist at the University of Sheffield, recommends letting the child forge their own emotional connection to the language. Her son gave up on German for several years before returning to it. She let him determine when they would speak it together. They joke about his Anglo-German mash-ups and incorporate them into their lexicon. Like many youngsters, his time on the Internet is restricted—but he is allowed more if he uses it in German. Ms Little suggests learning through apps and entertainment made for native speakers.
    Languages are an intimate part of identity; it is wrenching to try and fail to pass them on to a child. Success may be a question of remembering that they are not just another thing to be drilled into a young mind, but a matter of the heart.
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答案 “亲爱的，外婆跟你说话的时候，你听得懂吗?”女孩点点头。记者约翰逊(Johnson)在机场见到了小女孩，以及她的丹麦籍母亲和英国籍父亲，当时他们正准备前往丹麦。这对父母急切地向记者分享他们如何在伦敦用双语养育女儿的经历，那并不是件容易的事。由于女孩的父亲不会说丹麦语，所以孩子只能从母亲那里听到丹麦语，而她的母亲也已经接受了女儿用英语来跟她对话的事实。 这可能是个艰难的过程。不能与心爱的人用母语交流令人难受；不能将它传递给后代可能更为痛苦。许多身为侨民和移民的父母对此会感到挫败。他们绞尽脑汁，在育儿论坛和社交媒体上分享自己的经历，希望找到成功培养双语儿童的秘诀。 虽然儿童习得语言就像海绵吸水一般，但这并不意味着简单地将他们暴露在语言环境中就足够了。他们必须听得足够多才能很好地理解，用得足够多才能自如地表达。而缺乏需求或强烈愿望作为动力的孩子往往会避免这项脑力劳动，孩子们的大脑已经够忙碌了。 因此，当父母移居国外后，母语往往鲜少被提起，甚至慢慢被遗忘。过去，政府不鼓励移民家庭继续使用他们的语言。当时，泰迪.罗斯福(Teddy Roosevelt)担心美国会变成一个“通晓多国语言的寄宿家庭”。如今，政府倾向于不做过多干预。一些官员甚至认为外来移民的语言能力是一种宝贵的资源。然而，在许多因素的共同作用下，孩子们仍然未能学会或是不曾学习父母的语言。 其中一个大的因素是制度压力。孩子们花在第二语言上的时间多意味着他们在第一语言上花的功夫少，所以教师总是不提倡父母对孩子讲自己的母语。(如果第二语言缺乏国际认可，情况尤为如此。)考虑到后代的教育，父母往往不情愿地遵从老师的意见。这确实令人失望，因为孩子们实际上可以掌握两种甚至多种语言。虽然研究确实表明，在一段时间内孩子们每种语言的词汇量可能会有所减少，但其他研究认为双语者可能存在认知优势。他们可能更擅长处理复杂的任务，更善于保持注意力，而且在晚年。老年痴呆的发病时间也较迟。 然而，即使没有这些附加优势，双语儿童与亲人和另一种文化建立联系本身就是一件好事。如何实现呢?谢菲尔德大学(University of Sheffield)的德国语言学家扎比内-利特尔(Sabine Little)建议让孩子们自己建立与语言的情感联系。她的儿子好几年不学德语，后来才重新学习。利特尔让儿子决定什么时候一起说德语。他们拿他的英德混搭单词开玩笑，并把它们纳入日常对话中。和许多青少年一样，他上网的时间是有限制的，但如果在上网时可以使用德语来操作，那么他可以有更多的上网时间。利特尔女士建议孩子可以利用专为母语人士设计的应用程序和娱乐活动进行学习。 语言是个人身份认同的重要部分，试图将它传递给后代却失败是件非常痛苦的事。需要记住的是，要想获得成功，语言不仅需要灌输到年轻人的脑袋，还需要直达他们的心灵。
解析     1.第1段第三句enroute为固定搭配，意思是while travelling to a particular place“当到一个特定地方旅行”，结合本文语境，此处可译作“前往”。
    2.第3段第一句Children are linguistic sponges若直译为“儿童像语言海绵”则显得生硬，故翻译时可将“语言海绵”一词进行解释说明，译作“习得语言就像海绵吸水一般”，
    3.第4段第五句conspire to为固定搭配，意思是(of events)to seem to work together to make something bad happen“(指事件)似乎在共同作用下使坏事发生”，结合本文语境，此处可译作“在……的共同作用下”。
    4.第5段第四句prestige原义为“声望”，在文中指的是如果第二语言没有国际地位，教师更不鼓励家长用母语与子女交流，故可译作“缺乏国际认可”。
    5.第6段第一句side-effects原义为“附带的后果”，在文中指的是第5段第8、9句提到的学习第二语言给儿童带来的益处，故此处可译作“附带优势”。
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