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Language description and use

This article surveys the legal status of English in Israel before and since the country became independent; attitudes towards the language; its use in schools, by the media, as a vehicle of creative writing, and its use in other domains; the influence of English on Hebrew; the kinds of English used; and related topics. Although official domestic use of English declined to nearly zero in 1948, English has been played an ever greater role since then: (a) it now rivals Yiddish as the chief non-Hebraic influence on Modern Hebrew; (b) it is now Israel's chief link language with the non-Israeli world (and even with Jews outside Israel); and (c) on the whole, it is now the most studied, the most prestigious, and the best known foreign language in Israel. The kinds of English used in Israel are discussed (how the different kinds of English brought from other countries have influenced one another, how local languages have influenced them, and what local innovations have emerged). The paper looks at the question of how insights in linguistics and related research can be used to improve communication skills and the teaching of them. With the current proliferation of information facilities, the transfer of messages into other languages ('language mediation') is being carried out in innumerable ways, from simultaneous interpreting to literary translation. The product of language mediation is never the result of direct experience put into language; it is always a secondary product or a 'text-induced text'. The main problem is how to achieve a target text which can serve as an adequate replica of the source text. Much of the original impact is lost in a translation because a source text is rooted in the communicative matrix of the source-language community. Text linguistics suggests that it is the supra-sentential macro-structures which are responsible for 'textness'. A source text is embedded in, and differentiated from, what might be called 'background texts'. A target text is similarly automatically related by its comprehender to its new target-language background.An awareness of the text as a unit of translation will shed light on the nature of the source text as well as on any attempt to 'process it for target-language consumption'. Language mediation can tell no more about the original than a reader or listener of the original is consciously aware of, particularly where textual arrangement (structural features) is concerned. Solving the problems of bilingual mediation comes down to isolating these subtextual units which help to carry over relatively discrete items of information - these units often transcend sentence boundaries. Texts