Lost In Translations

One particularly humorous benefit of living abroad is the inevitable encounter with English mistranslations. Delightful, quirky, sometimes even scary, these offbeat misnomers are literally everywhere. My favorites include “Carribean Pirat” (on a T-shirt), “South Beach Saveguard” (on another T-shirt), and “Melissa Love Pirates” (on a brazen storefront).

Is anyone sensing a high-seas conspiracy here?

Now, please don’t think I’m being ethnocentrically superior; if you saw the way a confused KFC executive tried to translate “finger-licken’ good” into Portuguese, you would understand. At best the motto turns out to be funny, at worst, it’s highly offensive to any person who happens by.

You see, all these things stem from the misguided notion that one language is translatable into another. It’s not, and don’t let a bad foreign language teacher tell you otherwise. Words are not concrete things, they all have different shades and weights and social contexts and it’s silly to think that would carry across to a different language. One society has 20 different words for snow, and other has 20 different words for sand. How could they possibly correspond?

Now, I am reasonably intelligent person, I read more then anyone I know, and my test scores claim that I have a decent vocabulary. All of which means precisely nothing in Portuguese. I can’t even order a cheeseburger without getting a laugh or a funny look from the waiter (I still haven’t decided which is worse) and all because I’m stuck on the useless idea of “translation”.

Someone once told me that humility it thinking of yourself as one human being, no more and no less. And that charity is extending that same courtesy to everyone else in the world.

As a naive adolescent, I assumed that the notion of charity was the hard part because, let’s be honest here, what teenager doesn’t have a god complex? But now I realize that humility is, by far, the tougher course. Because now I’m humiliated in a thousand little ways every day by not even being able to communicate the most basic and simplest of my desires to the people around me. And even though I am learning, it is still frustrating to watch a fully functional human being in one society, devolve into little more than a child in another.

So, then, My New Year’s Resolution: I will be one who is hard-working at learning a new language, yet one who has a sense of humor when it does not always work out. I will be one who is ambitious about joining in a conversation, yet one who graceful when the conversation is not fully understood.

But above all, I will be one. No more, no less.