Lost (and found) in translation
Writing in English as a second language
This is a crosspost with the Daily Themes blog.
Right now at the Sochi Winter Olympics over 1,000 translators are standing by to help the international audience communicate. The two permanent official Olympic languages — French and English — will be supplemented this year by Russian, the language of the host country. Translating everything that athletes, journalists and tourists need into English, however, is easier said than done. Journalists are highlighting the many problems that can arise from mistranslations by tweeting their favorite signs, menu items and notes.
Often, idioms in particular prove to be a stumbling point for even the best translators and writers. Many find themselves “in over their heads,” or “on thin ice” when they start trying to make their writing more colloquial.
Not everyone sees these sorts of mistakes as problematic, however. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote at the Atlantic, often “mistakes” in English are really information about the writer’s native language. Attempts to rid global English of these quirks amount to an attempt to homogenize and assimilate people of different cultural backgrounds into the Anglophone mindset.
These “mistakes” — if you really listen — can tell you more than any “standard” English would be able to. (Check out Jonathan Safran Foer’s narrator Sasha in Everything is Illuminated and you’ll see what I mean.)
But where do you draw the line between assimilation and accessibility? How do you incorporate your own background, your own voice into your writing, without leaving the realm of the intelligible for the realm of the laughable?
