Learning a second language is never easy,and, generally speaking,(1) ___________________________________________.This is at least partly due to what is known as language interference,meaning that the linguistic patterns of our first language interfere with those of the second
because no two languages have exactly the same sounds and grammatical structures.(2) _______________________________________________.Russian—unlike English —has an obligatory category for gender which demands that a noun,and often a pronoun,specify whether it is masculine or feminine.Likewise,when translating an English story into Chinese in which a character identified as cousin appears,a Chinese translator requires to know whether it refers to a male or a female,whether the character is older or younger than the speaker,and whether the character belongs to the family of the speaker’s father or mother.Therefore “ biaomei ” can be translated into English only by the awkward statement“a female cousin on my mother’s side and younger than I”.The Russian/English and Chinese/English examples illustrate
the basic problem in any translation.No matter how skilled translators,they cannot take the language out of the speech community that uses it.(3) _________________________________________.Rather, it is a busy intersection among at least two languages with all of their peculiar characteristics, the cultures of the two speech communities,and the speech situation in which the statement was uttered.
