Sunday, December 17, 2006

Lost in Translation

Zia Haider Rahman, writing in the Times of London, notes the language issues and the need for assimilation in Britain. An excerpt:

The financial cost is bad enough, but there is a wider problem about the confused signals we are sending to immigrant communities. We are telling them they don’t have to learn English, let alone integrate. Worse, by insulating them linguistically we have created communities that are now incubators for Islamo-fascism.

The evidence is plain to anyone who visits Brick Lane in the East End of London. In the Bangladeshi community from which I come, English is a foreign language. Restaurants, shops and doctors’ surgeries all cater to a population that speaks Bengali or Sylheti. Even the street signs are in Bengali. The language barrier is reinforced by multiculturalists whose zeal to translate everything has given people a disincentive to speak this country’s language.

Every year Bangladeshis sit at the bottom of rankings of educational achievement. Their society persists in economic stagnation that locks many people into the catering industry. Drug abuse and crime are on the rise in the East End. Functionally illiterate young Bangladeshi males, with no hope of employment, can choose between extremists in the mosques or the gangs in the streets.

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