跨国婚姻大势所趋:德国先生娶法国太太,英美小姐嫁西班牙丈夫

The mists over marriage
笼罩婚姻的乌云
So it is all the more disappointing that until recently so little has been known about these unions. Records are patchy. Some countries do not collect annual information about the citizenship of couples. Official figures may say nothing about a marriage if it takes place abroad (for example in the country of the immigrant spouse).
失望的是，直至近期这样的婚姻组合才引起人们关注。各国的婚姻记录都对这种形式一知半解的。有些国家每年收集有关这类夫妻的公民身份的信息。官方公布的数字对在国外登记的婚姻可能只字未提（比如在本国移民夫妻）。
Defining what counts as international is tricky too. A wedding of a local man and a foreign-born bride is easy. But the marriage of two foreigners in a third country sometimes counts and sometimes doesn’t. Trickiest of all is how to treat the marriage of a second-generation immigrant who has citizenship of a host country (say, the child of a Moroccan in France or a Mexican in America). If such a person marries a native Frenchwoman or an American, that usually does not count as international, even though it is an alliance across ethnic lines. Perversely, if he marries a girl from his parents’ country of origin, that does count as international—but this is not a marriage across an ethnic divide and may indicate isolation not assimilation.
怎样的婚姻才算作跨国的呢？这也需要慎重定义。当地的男子和出生在国外的女孩结婚的情况简单，肯定算作是。但两个外国人在第三个国家结婚却是有时或许是，或许不是。最具技术性的是一个已经有了所在国绿卡的移民的下一代的婚姻（比如，法国籍摩洛哥人的后代或美国籍墨西哥人的后代）。如果这样的身份人和当地的法国人结婚，和美国人结婚，这样的通常就不算作是跨国的，即使仍然跨越了民族种族。偏偏如果他娶了来自家乡的女孩却算作是跨国，但不跨民族种族，这意味着移民后是被孤立，还是同化。
Belatedly, answers to these questions of scale and definition are coming, chiefly thanks to the efforts of the International Union for the Scientific study of Population (IUSSP), a professional association of demographers, and, especially, of Doo-Sub Kim, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul who chairs its panel on cross-border marriages. Global figures remain sketchy, but marriage patterns in Asia and Europe, at least, are becoming clearer. Some tentative, often surprising, conclusions are emerging.
最终，回答完这一系列问题，跨国婚姻的定义姗姗来迟。这主要归功于一个专业的人口统计组织，International Union for the Scientific study of Population (IUSSP)，尤其是担任跨国婚姻研究专家组主席的首尔汉阳大学的Doo-Sub Kim教授，全球的数据很粗略，但至少亚洲和欧洲的婚姻组合的模式逐渐清晰。暂时的研究结论已经浮出水面，带给了人们惊喜。
Asia is the part of the world where cross-border marriages have been rising most consistently. According to Gavin Jones of the National University of Singapore, 5% of marriages in Japan in 2008-09 included a foreign spouse (with four times as many foreign wives as husbands). Before 1980, the share had been below 1%. In South Korea, over 10% of marriages included a foreigner in 2010, up from 3.5% in 2000. In both countries, the share of cross-border marriages seems to have stabilised lately, perhaps as a result of the global economic slowdown. The country with the biggest share of such unions is Taiwan, where 13% of wives in 2009 were foreigners, about the same level as in 1998, but a big fall from the peak in 2003, when 28% of all weddings involved a foreign-born wife. Chinese citizens are not considered foreigners in Taiwan and if you include marriages in which they are one of the spouses, the proportion is still higher. International marriages have played a significant role in modifying the ethnic homogeneity of all these East Asian countries.
在世界上，亚洲是一个跨国婚姻现象一直都在持续攀升的地区。根据新加坡国立大学的Gavin Jones的研究，2008至2009年间日本5%的婚姻都是日本人和外国人的组合（外国媳妇是外国丈夫的四倍）。1980年以前，这种情况的概率低于1%。在韩国，这个数字从2000的3.5%上升到2010年的10%以上。近期，在这两个国家跨国婚姻的现象趋于稳定，这也许是全球经济衰退的原因造成的。这种现象最常见的地区台湾，13%的新娘是外国人，和1998年持平，但比起2003年的峰值28%，下降了很多。中国大陆的公民在台湾不被认作外国人，否则，如果加上这种情况，结婚双方一方是大陆的，比例将更高。在改变东亚国家的种族单一性上，跨国婚姻扮演了十分重要的角色。
International marriages are common in much of Europe, too. Calculations by Giampaolo Lanzieri, an Italian demographer, show that in France the proportion of international marriage rose from about 10% in 1996 to 16% in 2009. In Germany, the rise is a little lower, from 11.3% in 1990 to 13.7% in 2010. Some smaller countries have much higher levels. Nearly half the marriages in Switzerland are international ones, up from a third in 1990. Around one in five marriages in Sweden, Belgium and Austria involves a foreign partner.
在欧洲的大部分地区，跨国婚姻也是常见的。意大利人口学家Giampaolo Lanzieri计算得出，法国跨国婚姻在所有婚姻中的比率从1990年的10%上升到2009年的10%。德国的上升幅度略低从1990年的11.3%到2010年的13.7%，一些小国的比例高得多。瑞士将近一半婚姻都是跨国的，比1990年的数字上升三分之一。在瑞典、比利时、奥地利大约五分之一的婚姻的一方是外国人。