Topic: Education
English as a Second Language, Translations
by Tamim Ansary
If you speak English, why bother learning a second language? After all, English is spoken in most countries now, and it's spreading. You don't need French to order a sandwich in Paris, not anymore.
But learning a second language isn't merely about ordering a meal in a foreign country. It's about perspective. Every language is a lens. If you were born wearing pink glasses and could never take them off or exchange them for another shade, you would assume the world is pink without even being aware of pinkness as a quality--pink as compared to what? In the same way, if you know only one language, it's hard to be aware that you are looking through a lens: You think you are simply seeing the world as it is. Fluency in a second tongue gives you a chance to see through a different lens. That can help you realize that some part of what you are seeing is not the world, but the lens--even when you go back to your original language.
Inside two languages
I've been fluent in two tongues for as long as I can remember. My father was a Farsi-speaking Afghan, my mother an English-speaking American. In my family, we borrowed words back and forth between the languages, but I always knew they could not be combined. Each was a world. When I switched languages I switched worlds.
Shortly after arriving in America, I remember, I hit on a "foolproof" scheme for selling fiction to Esquire Magazine: I would, I thought, take a story already published in the magazine and replace each word with an exact synonym. It didn't work. You probably guessed that. Looking back, I laugh at the harebrained folly of my scheme. Yet no one laughs at the translator, who proposes essentially the same project--to replace each word in a written text with its exact synonym in another language.
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What's in a word?
Translation assumes that humanity has some finite collection of meanings in common and that each language has a word for each meaning. Actually, of course, words denote things people have noticed, and different peoples have noticed different things.
Last summer, I was in Colorado with a bunch of my Afghan cousins, sitting on a lawn and lazing away the summer afternoon. As the light sank, one cousin said, "Let's go indoors. I'm getting qukh."
My Farsi has faded somewhat in the many years since I left the Farsi-speaking world, and qukh was new to me. "What is qukh?"
"Well," said my cousin, "you know, how if you sit on grass long enough, especially late in the day, the moisture rising from the earth makes the fabric of your pants damp?"
Yes.
"And you know how the damp fabric clings to your skin?"
Uh-huh.
"And when you pull the fabric away, your skin feels kind of bumpy and itchy?"
Yes.
"Well, that's qukh!"
Now, this usage may seem so precise and limited that one would rarely find a use for it, even if the word existed in English. But the very next day, driving to Aspen, my back was sweating against the vinyl seat; it made the shirt stick to my skin; and after a few hours I had to pull over because--well, I was feeling a bit qukh. Since then, I have noticed ever so many instances of this phenomenon.
Part II: The trouble with translation
Of course, English could adopt this word, or any word, if English speakers found it useful. That's what languages do. But once a word comes into English, it is used in real-life English-language situations, in letters and literature and conversations, and thus accumulates associations that make it an organic part of the experience of English-speaking people. These associations and connections, these capillaries of meaning, seat the word in the living flesh of the English language. And every word in a language has such capillaries connecting it to all the rest of the language. We don't see them but if we know the language, we feel them: They are a part of its meaning.
This hits me every time I play around with translation. Once, for example, I was trying to translate a ghazal, a sonnet-length lyric, by the 14th-century poet Hafez from Persian (a.k.a. Farsi, a.k.a. Dari) into English. Translated literally, the first two lines of this celebrated poem go as follows:
If that Turk from Shiraz were to capture my heartTags:
I would give away Samarkand and Bokhara for her Hindu mole.
I suppose it's no use telling you that this couplet thrums with mysterious erotic resonance in Persian. Few English speakers will be convinced, especially about the Eros.
But why is so much lost? After all, practically half the words in this couplet are names. They sound and mean the same in English as in Persian. Samarkand, Bokhara, and Shiraz are cities you will find on any English-language map. And even in English, Turks are Turks and Hindus are Hindus.
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