Here I go again. By the time you read this I’ll be sitting on a bus someplace between San Jose and Tilaran, Costa Rica. I’m back in San Jose to finish off the dental work that I started back in November. It will be great to have all that over with but I’ll miss this jet-setting lifestyle. I might have to consider plastic surgery next.
For the newcomers, my original Costa Rican Medical Holiday took place back in November, 2010. My research found that I could find as good or better medical care in the “developing world” – what used to be known as the “third world” up until we found out that they did a lot of stuff better than we do – at a fraction of the cost of the same procedures in the US. I’ll let you go read my earlier post for my “quality of health care” rant. Suffice it to say that I can get my needed treatment done, pay for a plane ticket from Seattle, pay for my hotels, pay for my ground transport, food and everything else I might do, all for less than half of what just the treatment costs in the United States.
All this flitting about in international airspace got me thinking, which is almost never a good thing, about how we relate to each other around the globe and, more particularly, why we’re so bad at it. I’m sure part of it is “tribal preference” – the thought that since something is done or thought by my tribe, or State, or Country that it automatically is better than the same thing done or thought elsewhere. You would think that we might have learned something from the manufacturing outsourcing that has been going on since the 1960s but I guess not. In the end I figured the real reason that nobody understands what anybody else is saying is that both parties are not hearing what they expect, even when they are both speaking the same language.
I offer myself as the prime example.
My first glimpse of this phenomenon came about a year ago when my new Dell computer developed some minor software glitches. I called for help. My call was answered by “Rob” or “Bill” or “Tony”, all of whom spoke with a noticeable Indian accent. They were all fluent in English so I expected the troubleshooting to go smoothly. Big mistake on my part. The problem quickly became one of them not understanding what I was saying and me not being able to say what I wanted them to hear in a way that would ensure they would. Sort of like that sentence. No matter how or how many times I explained the problem, “Rob”, “Bill”, or “Tony” would insist that the problem was due to one thing when it was really due to something else. I thanked them, threw the phone at the wall, and uninstalled the problem software. My complaint was fixed but in a rather ham-handed way. I was completely unable to say in American English what I wanted them to hear in Indian English.
More recently I was reading the news and saw the headline that “Libyan Leader Declares Cease-Fire”. Immediately following this declaration was the news that Libyan troops moved in and commenced an artillery and rocket barrage of some rebel-held city or another. Whatever set of words in Libyan Arabic translates into “cease-fire” in English clearly doesn’t mean “cease-fire” to the Libyans. Maybe it does but really means more along the lines of “we will bomb our opponents until they stop shooting” rather than “we will stop shooting”. One way or another something is getting lost in translation.
In my international travels I run into the same thing. I may want to say something like “I need a taxi to go to the dentist.” Which in Spanish should be “Necesito un taxi ir al dentista.” When I say that, I hope that a taxi drives up and whisks me off to the dentist. However, judging by the responses I get, what I am really saying translates as: “I need a taxi but the frog upon your face is forlorn” or something similar. Either my pronunciation or word selection is making understanding me difficult. I end up not at the dentist and my room is filled with croaking amphibians.
Most of us are aware of the problem of transliteration, which is the word for word translation from one language into another. This is done without regard for correct sentence structure or the rules of grammar in the target language. I’m sure all you have first-hand experience of transliteration from the operating instructions for TV or stereo equipment where you would read something along the lines of “Flip yellow switch hand up and back until blue knob.” In Japanese this probably makes perfect sense but when each individual word is translated it makes no sense at all.
But even when properly translated there can be a complete, shall we say, disruption of intent. Let’s use the last sentence of the preceding paragraph as an example. When I translate “In Japanese this probably makes perfect sense but when each individual word is translated it makes no sense at all.” into Japanese and then translate it back I end up with “This perhaps has formed complete meaning with Japanese, but each individual word when being translated, at all has not formed meaning.” Which actually makes a lot more sense than I thought it would, kind of. I decided to press on and do some more experiments more apropos to my current situation in the Spanish speaking world.
My sample sentence, when switched into Español results in: “In Japanese this probably has much sense but when every word results that does not have sense in all the.” It suddenly became very apparent why the frog is forlorn and I am not getting to the dentist. I may know what some Spanish words mean in English but I have absolutely no clue what they mean in Spanish. Me culpo.
I dug even deeper in my quest to understand this evidently-global inability to communicate. What came out was unexpected. Given the current state of geo-economic reality, when you go through Chinese as a step in translation you end up with junk, but it’s kind of pretty junk. When I start with my test sentence and translate it into Chinese first, I get some interesting results. If the path is English – Chinese – Japanese – English, perfectly reasonable given that many Japanese products are made in China, then the result is: “In Japan, it may be reasonable when the very translation of each word is meaningless.” Which seems like it might mean something but is just a few syllables long of a haiku.
English, our beloved tongue, is quickly being usurped by people who, as a first language, don’t speak English. Our language, which has always been one of the more malleable, is in a state of change unprecedented in its history. From its earliest roots English has been a language in turmoil. English is the language that in 1066 said: Oh, we’ve been invaded by the Normans? Let’s take all their words. English is the language whose speakers in the 1500s said I’d like to buy a vowel. Within 100 years the pronunciation of the entire language shifted dramatically. This is why Shakespeare’s poetry is readable but Chaucer’s is not. Currently American English is in the process of incorporating the entire Spanish dictionary into a kind of dialecto del norte-americano the implications of which are still developing. Next comes Chinese.
English has become the global language of choice for business, technical, and political communication. It is the de facto second language worldwide. Currently, in China alone, there are more people learning to speak English as a second language than currently speak it as a first – in the entire rest of the world. In another ten years or so the English language, along with most everything else, will be made in China. At that point the driving force of the English language will come from Asia and we in North America will be consigned into the oh-isn’t-that-quaint-dustbin-of-history position that the Englishcurrently hold: Defenders of the Mother Tongue.
A defense without hope. As English morphs in Spanglish and thence to CantoManderanglish we will end up with a single common global language unparalleled in potential for misunderstanding each other. It will be the Tower of Babel writ in a single tongue. At that point I’m sure we will all yearn for the good old days when we could just flip yellow switch hand up and back until blue knob.