With all the
language studying and teaching I'm doing this year, I noticed that
there is one problem that just keeps popping up again and again. That
is the misconception among many language learners that the meaning of
a sentence is it's translation. People keep asking what
something means, when they are really asking for a translation. I tend to get a lot of puzzled looks when I ask them to make the distinction. Because people who are not fluent in a language tend to extract the
meaning from the translation rather then the original word or
sentence. They take a detour, if you will. And they don't grasp that their native language is a tool in that process, not the objective. I guess it is especially hard when you learn your first foreign language, to wrap your head around the idea that your native language is not the ne plus ultra of communication.
The thing is
though, that any given language system encodes meaning independent of
another language system, which is why at a certain point in learning
you won't need the help of your mother tongue to decode the meaning.
And despite the fact, that we tend to equate grammatical phenomena as
much as possible across languages, there are in every language
certain things that you can't quite imitate in every or most other
languages. This is what gets lost in translation.
For example, when
I want to greet someone in German by saying “Hello, nice to meet
you,” unlike in English, I have to convey meaning about the nature
of my relationship to that person. I have to decide whether or not to
address them formally or informally. And this can have far reaching
consequences. Say, for example, I meet someone in a business setting
and he uses the informal pronoun “du” (which is something that
happens all the time because I'm female and look a little younger
than I am). Well, big deal you might say, it's just a tiny little
word. But with that tiny little word he has just put me in somewhat
of a loose loose situation. He is basically patronizing me. I can now
either say nothing and let him patronize me or call him out, which
will probably have a negative impact on my future relations with him
and everyone to whom he communicates that I'm kind of 'difficult'.
This is even more detrimental when said person is above me in the
hierarchy. Because in that case I still have to address him formally
regardless of how he addresses me and if my male coworkers - whom he
is addressing formally - take note of that, they'll assume
superiority regardless of our job descriptions or performance. And
there you have your worst case scenario. So tiny word – major
implications.
Long story short
to really understand a language you have to grasp these nuances and
be aware of them regardless of whether or not you can recreate them
in translation. Because it's the meaning your after.
