Lost in Translation: Language, Communication, and the Cultural Context
Unlike programming languages where everything is clearly defined and follows rigid syntactical and semantic rules, human languages are more open-ended, constantly evolving and unpredictable — in a sense, organic.
Language consists of five main components: phonology, the study of speech sounds; morphology, the study of the forms of words; syntax, the analysis of the arrangement of words to form sentences; semantics, the study of meaning in language; and pragmatics, the study of context and how it contributes to meaning.
While the first four components form the structure of language, without which language would just be an incoherent pile of symbols — it is context that adds meaning and intent to language. As a construct, language only has meaning because humans perceive that it has meaning.
This becomes even more complicated when one deals with the field of translation where multiple languages are involved. A certain statement may mean one way in one language, but it may mean something completely different in another should a linguist straightforwardly translate the statement word for word.
Moreover, countries that speak the same language do not necessarily share the exact same culture. This divergent evolution of language creates nuances through idiomatic expressions, slang and other aspects of the vernacular. A speaker of Canadian French might not necessarily have a smooth conversation with a 21st century native French speaker born and raised in France.
The late linguist Eugene A. Nida noted that there are two serious misconceptions about language — human language — that impede our understanding of the nature of translation and interpretation. First, is the “naive” notion that languages consist merely of words and grammar; second, is the distorted view that the primary or even sole purpose of language is to disseminate information when, in fact, the informative function of language only occurs in 20 percent of verbal communication.
Nida further explains that language is actually a bundle of related codes rather than just a single, “verbal” code consisting of words and grammar. The verbal code is always associated with paralinguistic, extralinguistic, supplementary, and associative or connotative codes. This extends also to written communications.
As for the sociological functions of language, he notes that language has imperative, performative, emotive and interpersonal functions. He comments that a failure to respect these sociological functions can “completely nullify even the most sensitive attention to the purely linguistic factors [of language].”
And because of this, the process of translation and interpretation requires a bit more thought beyond merely finding a close equivalent to a particular utterance. It requires a keen sensitivity to cultural and social customs to be able to translate the source into something that is not only intelligible but is also understandable within context.
Translation and the Cultural Context
Filipino sociologist and author Amparo S. Buenaventura wrote in her 1965 paper, the “Socio-Cultural Aspect of Language,” that:
The greatest obstacle to understanding other peoples lies in the failure to communicate effectively. For one may speak a foreign language with grammatical correctness and yet the thought content may still remain quite foreign. Effective communication involves much more than just learning to substitute one word for another and to master a few sounds.
Real communication only occurs when two people understand the situations and assumptions behind the words spoken. And this could only happen if both parties possess a deep sense of each other’s culture, social customs and hierarchy, and thought patterns.
For example, Spanish is widely spoken and taught in the United States and is even considered a de facto official language in some states. However, learning the language formally does not necessarily include the level of acculturation that would allow an American speaker of the Spanish language to understand certain expressions, slang terms and sayings that have evolved out of the particular brand of Spanish spoken by the Mexican people.
Moreover, even within the context of the Spanish language, which has divergently evolved in the countries and locales that the language is spoken. Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America would add borrowed terms from native American languages and formulate their own sayings, slang and expressions based on their mixed culture. Post-colonial Spanish in Spain would have also evolved with modern expressions and terminologies. Some words may even have different meanings for each country.
There are dozens of terms for “money” in the Spanish language. Aside from the shared terms for it such as dinero, people in Spain might refer to it as pasta which closely equates to “dough” in American slang. In Costa Rica people might refer to it as harina which is literally “flour.”
Then there are those words that have no direct equivalent — at least none that could be summed up in a single word or phrase — words that are uniquely native to a language which would be borne out of a culture’s innate sensibilities.
Saudade, which Brazilian poet and philosopher Fernando Santoro notes as a “key feeling of the Portuguese soul,” is an untranslatable concept that is often inadequately equated to nostalgia or longing.
Santoro quotes the word’s definition by early Portuguese historian Duarte Nunes de Leão in his 1606 treatise “The Origin of the Portuguese Language as the “memory of a thing with the desire for the same thing.” It is the remembrance of a cherished past that is no more and longing for a similar happiness in the present.
The concept of saudade is deeply entrenched in the Portuguese psyche that it is reflected on various aspects of life, as Santoro puts it:
The object that produces saudade determines in each case an existential, cultural, aesthetic, religious, metaphysical position (the saudades for a lover, a country, a time, this or that idea, etc.); inversely, everything, from literature to religion and politics, is capable of an interpretation modulated by saudade
Only by understanding these cultural phenomena can translators and interpreters truly understand the weight and depth of language in relation to the different facets of a particular ethnolinguistic group. This forms the foundation of nuanced and empathetic cross-language communication. Meaning as a human construct (in the case of language) is relative after all.
Nida, in his paper entitled “Translating Means Communicating: A Sociolinguistic Theory of Translation I,” enumerates four factors involved in translation: the message; the audience; the circumstances in which translation takes place; and the circumstances in which the message is received.
The form of the message may vary greatly between oral and written, from more literary or artistic texts such songs, operas, novels and films, to more technical texts such as scientific papers and textbooks. By understanding the differences between these forms, a translator is able to produce better-suited translations based on choice of words, formality of tone, structure and rhythm.
Audiences differ vastly as well based on demography: age, educational attainment, social standing, income, professional background and so on.
Circumstance of translation refers to the situation that affects the quality of translated work. An interpreter for a diplomat in conversation does not necessarily have the same amount of time as a linguist tasked to translate a collection of poems from the source language to another. Despite the necessity that translators and interpreters must take care in producing translations, there will always be a compromise based on the circumstance.
Circumstance of reception on the other hand, refers to the effects of the medium through which a translation is communicated to the quality and form of a translated work. Nida uses the example of a translated play. In this example, there is a large difference between a person reading a translated play on paper in the comfort of their home versus a person who watches the same play performed on stage.
Translators have to take into consideration that one form, with annotations to denote subtleties in the text would have a different effect when delivered verbally as a performed play would rely on emotion, intonation and rhythm.
In the modern context
With the increasing hyperconnectivity of people across borders owing to social media channels, instant messaging services, content streaming platforms and e-commerce sites, the world continues to become more and more globalized. This means that there is a greater desire for “shared experiences” between different countries and cultures, making translation and interpretation even greater necessities in the near future.
Despite the World Wide Web being perceived as a melting pot of cultures, language accessibility continues to be an issue. According to the Hootsuite and We Are Social Digital in 2020 report, 56.8 percent of the world’s top 10 million websites are in English. Russian comes second as the most commonly used language on websites with a mere 7.6 percent of websites being written in Cyrillic. Chinese only comes in at number 11 on Hootsuite’s list with 1.4 percent of websites currently written in Chinese despite being one of the most spoken languages in the world with 1.5 billion native speakers.
Considering the discrepancy between English websites and those written in other languages, there is much work to be done in making the Internet a universally accessible place. Recently, many companies have taken to using machine translation to address growing globalization and need for language accessibility.
Localizing websites and software using machine translation is faster and cheaper than using human translators. However, Nida commented that machine translation is inherently flawed as the rules that it follows in translation are tied too closely to the words rather than to concepts (context). Although machine translation has advanced considerably in recent years, This lack of contextual perception makes the outcome a hit-or-miss affair. It is still very much a mathematical operation, following rigid syntactical and semantic rules.
To remedy this, professional translation services use machine translation as a tool to assist professional translators, primarily to do the heavy lifting for high-volume projects for websites and programs. This means that making the text pragmatically understandable still rests on human hands.
As a human construction, language is organic in the sense that it evolves with its speakers. It continuously evolves as influenced by the context that it exists in. Translators and interpreters must not alienate the study of language from the sociocultural ideas and phenomena that influence its practice.
