translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views ISSN 2065-3514
(2008) Year I, Issue 1
Galaţi University Press
Editors: Elena Croitoru and Floriana Popescu (First volume)
Proceedings of the Conference Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views
9 – 11 October 2008 “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
pp. 185 – 189
ENGLISH IN SCHOOL VERSUS ENGLISH IN MASS-MEDIA
Andreea Mihaela Nedelcuţ
University of Craiova, Romania
As a language, English became one of the most important tools in
communication worldwide. Wherever you turn your head, everyone
knows a little bit of English – simple sentences that help them in different
situations. Even if you find yourself in China, India or Egypt you can use it
in order to be understood by the local natives.
Romanian educational circles decided to introduce this tool of
communication in kindergartens, schools and universities. After almost 20
years of teaching English, a problem has occurred: English in media or
slang English became very popular among Romanian students who started
mispronouncing words and skipping letters.
Besides some famous TV channels like BBC and CNN where
‘announcers read the news in ‘cut-glass accents’ like that of the Queen
today’(Russel, 2001:168), other channels – especially those for teens use all
sort of abbreviations and four – letter words that are put together in a
sentence without any meaning.
So, creative writers, TV and radio script-writers are allowed to break
the rules whenever they want to on the grounds that it is sometimes
necessary to do something wrong in order to get it right.
‘Copy-writers can happily use incomplete sentences in
advertisements, serious novelists can use unconventional sentence
structure, punctuation, and spelling to get the effect they want’ (Russel,
2001:170) In the TV world, the English used is accurate and academic
except the one used in some talk-shows where the main focus is on stories
of human interest: sex and violence, suffering and deviancy told in simple
words and uncomplicated sentence structures.
Probably, all languages own distinct registers from formal and
informal occasions. Speech and writing can be more or less formal
depending on the context, however, formal registers are more often
associated with writing, while informal ones with speech. In nowadays,
this rule does not apply to tabloids or magazines that use a new, high-tech,
abbreviated English.
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