I’ve talked about language and culture being linked before in this column. Language is how we think and controls everything we can say. Our English phrase “lost in translation” says it all: certain things are going to be left behind when you’re switching from one language to another. The things lost are more than just idioms and plays on words; bits of culture are left behind as well.
So if language and culture are inextricably linked, and if language is the window through which we begin to understand a culture, what really happens when we run into those untranslatable words or words that don’t slide nicely from one tongue to another, those words that are so dependent on cultural norms and notions that the true meaning is lost?
Try as we might, we can never truly understand something that’s been translated. Whether it is a work of literature or a political speech, we’re stuck in an in-between where it might syntactically make sense, but something is still amiss.
The realm of political rhetoric or poetry is, of course, on a grand stage, but what about words like “cafuné?” It’s the verb “to run your fingers tenderly through your lover’s hair” in Brazilian Portuguese.
My personal favorite in Italian is “gattara,” or “the old women who looks after the stray cats in your neighborhood because she has lost all hope of love”; our crazy cat lady summed up in one word.
Granted, yes, these words are not untranslatable in the most literal sense, but the translation loses some of its beauty. There is a cultural element in these words that doesn’t exactly cross the boundary from one language to another.
Translators have a rough job. They have to be intimately familiar not only with both languages’ structure, grammar and syntactical elements, but also the nuanced phrases while toeing the line between the two major translation types: “dynamic equivalency” or “essentially literally.”
Essentially, they must make a choice: preserve the author’s original words as closely as possible or getting across the general meaning by changing the text for a better flow in the new language. A good translator must constantly be keeping the rhythm and flow of a work from one language to another, while also somehow conveying the meaning of the author. Core meanings can completely change in translations, as the author is no longer in control of the work’s message; everything lies in the pen of the translator.
Living in an increasingly global world, we constantly run into this problem. How one can effectively cross cultural and linguistic boundaries through translation absolutely baffles me. I’ve never been good at translations, and I’m in awe of people who do it well, especially when it’s outside the context of the literature department.
Documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and Obama’s State of the Union Address all find themselves in more languages than I could name, affecting real people and real governments. Translation is something that reaches broader borders than the realms of the South American Fiction section of Barnes & Noble; it’s as issue we all deal with every day.
I think the issues of translations and things getting lost in translation are something we all forget sometimes. We live in a world where everything is instantly accessible on the Internet and we can have anything translated electronically just as quickly. The art of truly putting another’s words into another language is something that has been reduced to clicking a box on Google Translate.
I’m not saying we should all labor over Don Quixote or the newest press releases coming out of Libya with our trusty dual language dictionary at our sides; but what we read can’t be taken for granted. Words can change the world and their true meanings should never be taken lightly.
