ABSTRACT
A major objective of applied linguists is to confront the kinds of problems (and embrace the opportunities) that arise when groups or individuals speaking different languages interact. Few people have communicative competence in more than two or three languages, at most, and yet there are perhaps as many as 7,000 languages still being spoken around the planet. Communication between speakers who don’t share a common language is a universal and – so far! – permanent problem faced by humanity, and thus falls within the scope of applied linguistics. One solution has been the adoption of a lingua franca (see, for example, Knapp and Meierkord, 2002). Mandarin Chinese, for example, has been established over the centuries by the rulers in Beijing as the national Putonghua (‘common tongue’) of China, enabling communication between mutually unintelligible linguistic groups in this vast country. Over the past few decades, European Union documents have increasingly been drafted in English (DGT, 2007a). But the other option is, of course, translation, and bilinguals have served as translators and interpreters since time immemorial. Indeed, in practice lingua franca usage often works hand in hand with translation. In the European Union, for example, a document written in Swedish is unlikely to be translated directly into Portuguese, but rather ‘relay-translated’ from Swedish to English and then from English to Portuguese. And in East Asia, English as a Lingua Franca is often the intermediary through which speakers of regional languages like Russian and Japanese understand each other (Proshina, 2005).
