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Today, many learners still aim for an American or British standard. Textbooks instruct Indian English-speakers to avoid Indianisms such as “What is your good name?” for “What is your first name?”, or “I am working here for years” instead of “I have been working here for years.”
如今，许多英语学习者仍然力求达到美式英语或英式英语的标准。教科书让说英语的印度人避免印度腔，比如把“你的名字是什么？”说成“你的好名字是什么？”，或者把“我在这里已经工作了很多年”说出“我在这里正在工作了很多年”。
A guide to avoiding Europeanisms has long circulated in European Union institutions, to keep French- or German-speakers from (for example) using “actual” to mean “current”, as it does in their languages.
避免欧化英语的指南一直在欧盟机构内流传，目的是防止说法语或德语的人(例如)用actual（真实的）来表示“当前”，这是actual在法语和德语中的用法。
Yet as hundreds of millions of new speakers make English their own, they are going to be less keen to sound British or American. A generation of post-colonial novelists has been mixing native words and phrasings into their English prose, without translation, italics or explanation.
然而，随着数以亿计的新英语使用者将英语变成他们自己的语言，他们将不再热衷于让自己听起来像英国人或美国人。后殖民时期的一代小说家在他们的英语写作中混入了本土词汇和短语，而且没有翻译、标注斜体或进行解释。
Academic movements such as “English as a lingua franca” (ELF) have been developing the ideology that speakers—no longer referred to as “non-native” but rather “multilingual”—should feel free to ignore British or American norms.
“作为世界语的英语”(ELF)之类的学术运动一直在倡导这样一种思想，即说英语的人--不再被称为“非母语者”，而是“多语言使用者”--应该毫无顾忌地无视英式英语或美式英语的规范。
Karen Bennett of Nova University in Lisbon says the university website has been translated using words common in southern European English—like “scientific” for “academic”, or “rector” for “vice-chancellor”. The appropriate local dialect is not British or American but ELF.
里斯本诺瓦大学的凯伦·班内特说，该大学的网站在翻译成英语时，已经使用了南欧英语中常见的词汇，比如“科学的”代表“学术的”，“院长”代表“校长”。这种恰当的当地方言不是英式英语或美式英语，而是作为世界语的英语。
Given enough time, new generations of native speakers contribute not just words but their own grammar to the language they learn—from older speakers’ point of view, distorting it in the process.
假以时日，新一代以英语为母语的人不仅会贡献他们自己的词汇，还会贡献他们自己的语法，从老一代英语母语者的角度来看，这会逐渐扭曲英语。
“I am working here for years” is a mistake today, but it is not hard to imagine it becoming standard in the future in culturally confident Anglophone Indian circles.
“我在这里正在工作了很多年”现在看来是一个病句，但不难想象在未来，这句话会成为文化自信的讲英语的印度文化圈的标准句式。
If this disturbs you, remember that this column is written in a mangled version of Anglo-Saxon, learned badly by waves of Celts, Vikings, Normans and others until it became an unrecognisably different tongue.
如果你对此感到不安，请记住，本篇专栏文章就是用面目全非的盎格鲁-撒克逊语写成的，凯尔特人、维京人、诺曼人等等都学习了盎格鲁-撒克逊语，而且学得很糟糕，直到它变成了一种截然不同的语言。
And take comfort in the fact that such changes usually happen too slowly to affect comprehension in a single lifetime. Written language is less volatile than the spoken kind and exerts a stabilising force.
令人欣慰的是，这种变化通常发生得很慢，人在一辈子中还不会受到它对理解语言的影响。书面语的变化程度比口语要小，从而能起到稳定作用。
But if language is always evolving (true to the point of cliché), the adaptations are even more profound when they come as a result of new speakers hailing from different linguistic worlds.
但是，如果语言总是在进化(确实如此，简直是老生常谈了)，那么当来自不同语言世界人开始讲英语，从而带来语言的改变时，这种改变就会更加深远。
No language has ever reached more speakers than English. It is hard to predict how they will change it, but easy to rule out the notion that they will not change it at all. In the end, it will be theirs too.
再没有哪种语言像英语这样触及了如此多的人。很难预测人们将如何改变英语，但很容易排除人们完全不会改变英语这种想法。最终，英语也将属于他们。
