IELTS Handbook 17 – Test 2

Transcript

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Những từ bôi vàng: Các keywords xuất hiện trong câu hỏi

Những từ bôi cam: Ngôn ngữ chỉ dẫn – Các đầu mục lớn

Những từ bôi xanh:Đáp án

Right, everyone, let’s make a start. Over the past few sessions, we’ve been considering the reasons why some world languages are in decline, and today I’m going to introduce another factor that affects [=impact] languages, and the speakers of those languages, and that’s technology and, in particular, digital technology. In order to illustrate its effect, I’m going to focus on the Icelandic language, which is spoken by around 321,000 people [Tôi sẽ tập trung vào tiếng Iceland, ngôn ngữ có khoảng 321.000 người nói] (Question 31), most of whom live in Iceland – an island in the North Atlantic Ocean.

The problem for this language is not the number of speakers – even though this number is small. Nor is it about losing words to other languages, such as English. In fact, the vocabulary of Icelandic is continually increasing [vốn từ vựng của tiếng Iceland liên tục tăng lên] (Question 32) because when speakers need a new word for something, they tend to create one, rather than borrowing from another language. All this makes Icelandic quite a special language – it’s changed very little in the past millennium, yet it can handle twenty-first-century concepts related to the use of computers and digital technology. Take, for example [=such as], the word for web browser … this is “vafri” in Icelandic, which comes from the verb ‘to wander’ [Lấy ví dụ, từ cho trình duyệt web… “vafri” trong tiếng Iceland, có nguồn gốc từ động từ ‘to wander’]. I can’t think of a more appropriate term because that’s exactly what you do mentally when you browse the internet. Then there’s an Icelandic word for podcast [Tiếp đó, có một từ tiếng Iceland cho podcast] (Question 33) – which is too hard to pronounce! And so on.

Icelandic, then, is alive and growing, but – and it’s a big but – young Icelanders spend a great deal of time in the digital world and this world is predominantly English. Think about smartphones. They didn’t even exist until comparatively recently, but today young people use them all the time [=big users] [Hãy nghĩ về điện thoại thông minh. Chúng thậm chí không tồn tại cho đến khi tương đối gần đây, nhưng ngày nay những người trẻ tuổi sử dụng chúng mọi lúc] (Question 34) to read books, watch TV or films, play games, listen to music, and so on. Obviously, this is a good thing in many respects because it promotes their bilingual skills, but the extent of the influence of English in the virtual world is staggering and it’s all happening really fast [việc này thúc đẩy kỹ năng song ngữ của chúng, nhưng mức độ ảnh hưởng của tiếng Anh trong thế giới ảo là đáng kinh ngạc và tất cả đều diễn ra rất nhanh] (Question 35).

For their parents and grandparents, the change is less concerning because they already have their native-speaker skills in Icelandic. But for young speakers – well, the outcome is a little troubling. For example, teachers have found that playground conversations in Icelandic secondary schools can be conducted entirely in English [các cuộc trò chuyện trên sân chơi ở các trường trung học ở Iceland có thể được thực hiện hoàn toàn bằng tiếng Anh] (Question 36), while teachers of much younger children have reported situations where their classes find it easier to say what is in [=the content of] a picture using English, rather than Icelandic [nơi các học sinh của họ thấy dễ dàng hơn khi miêu tả những gì trong một bức tranh bằng tiếng Anh, thay vì tiếng Iceland] (Question 37). The very real and worrying consequence of all this is that the young generation in Iceland is at risk of losing its mother tongue.

Of course, this is happening to other European languages too, but while internet companies might be willing to offer, say, French options in their systems, it’s much harder for them to justify the expense of doing the same for a language that has a population the size of a French town [=small number of speakers], such as Nice. The other drawback of Icelandic is the grammar, which is significantly more complex [=complicated] than in most languages [Hạn chế khác của tiếng Iceland là ngữ pháp, phức tạp hơn đáng kể so với hầu hết các ngôn ngữ khác] (Question 38). At the moment, the tech giants are simply not interested in tackling this.

So, what is the Icelandic government doing about this? Well, large sums of money are being allocated to a language technology fund that it is hoped will lead to the development of Icelandic sourced apps and other social media and digital systems, but clearly this is going to be an uphill struggle.

On the positive side, they know that Icelandic is still the official language of education and government. It has survived for well over a thousand years and the experts predict that its future in this nation state is sound and will continue to be so. However, there’s no doubt that it’s becoming an inevitable second choice in young people’s lives.

This raises important questions. When you consider how much of the past is tied up in a language, will young Icelanders lose their sense of their own identity [Liệu những người trẻ tuổi ở Iceland có đánh mất ý thức về bản sắc của chính mình] (Question 39)? Another issue that concerns the government of Iceland is this. If children are learning two languages through different routes, neither of which they are fully fluent in, will they be able to express themselves properly [Nếu trẻ em học hai ngôn ngữ thông qua các cách khác nhau, cả hai ngôn ngữ đều không thông thạo, liệu chúng có thể diễn đạt đúng cách không] (Question 40)?