今日在读Kingsley Bolton的专著“Chinese Englishes”(注意书标题中的复数形式！！），发现有人将"lingua franca"翻译成“滥呱复滥呱”，实在是惊讶莫名。为了还原该术语的本来面目，我们先来看看该术语的定义或解释：

定义出处如下（From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia）

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

A lingua franca (or working language, bridge language, vehicular language) is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.

Characteristics：

"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic history or structure of the language: though pidgins and creoles often function as lingua francas, many such languages are neither pidgins nor creoles. Whereas a vernacular language is used as a native language in a single speaker community, a lingua franca goes beyond the boundaries of its original community, and is used as a second language for communication between communities. For example, English is a vernacular in the United Kingdom, but is used as a vehicular language (that is, a lingua franca) in the Philippines.

International auxiliary languages such as Esperanto have historically had such a low level of adoption and use that they can only be described as potential rather than functioning lingua francas.

Etymology：

The original Lingua Franca was a mixed language composed mostly (80%) of Italian with a broad vocabulary drawn from Turkish, French, Greek, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish. It was in use throughout the eastern Mediterranean as the language of commerce and diplomacy in and around the Renaissance era. At that time, Italian speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman empire. Franca was the Italian word for Frankish. Its usage in the term lingua franca originated from its meaning in Arabic and Greek, dating from before the Crusades and during the Middle Ages, whereby all Western Europeans were called "Franks" or Faranji in Arabic and Phrankoi in Greek during the times of the late Eastern Roman Empire. The term lingua franca is first recorded in English in 1678.

金山词霸给出的解释如下：“混合语, 任何混合国际商业用的语言”。如：A medium of communication between peoples of different languages（通用语：使用不同语言的人之间的交流语言）；A mixture of Italian with Provençal, French, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish, formerly spoken on the eastern Mediterranean coast.（佛兰卡语：原在地中海东部地区使用的由意大利、普罗旺斯语、法语、西班牙语、阿拉伯语、希腊语和土耳其语构成的混杂语）

根据上述背景知识，我们可以理解该术语的含义。如果翻译成“通用语”，又该如何？来看看当前“通用语”的含义：

通用语（英文：Lingua franca），指任何在母语人群之外，广泛传播的语言，通用语实际上会使某一时代、最具影响力的语言的使用者受益。有时通用语也指一种完全固定下来的正式语言，因此以前人们认为，法语是欧洲外交通用语。通常一种语言，会因为在国际商务中被广泛应用，而成为通用语。阿拉伯人最早用“通用语”一词来形容所有的罗曼语，尤其是意大利语。后来指直到19世纪末在地中海地区，特别是中东和北非，被海员使用的由罗曼语词汇、和很简单的语法构成的语言。到了1920年代以后至今，后起的英语便逐渐地取代了法语的国际通用语言的地位。

看来，将“lingua franca”翻译成“通用语”明白晓畅。