When I was teaching English in a business school in French, my students often had to produce a kind of project as part of their final evaluation. One term, a student who had come to fewer than half my classes handed in a piece of work which immediately looked suspect. It consisted of 4 or 5 sheets of printed paper, with very long sentences and no pictures or diagrams.
As soon as I began to read, I burst out laughing, amused but not at all impressed. It was clear that the student in question had gone to a French website on his chosen subject, swiped the text, and fed it through an online translation machine to get an English "equivalent". The translation was so literal that I had no trouble back-translating the first line, googling it, and turning up the original website.
The student of course got zero for his piece of work, and I did have to wonder whether he really thought he'd get away with it, or whether he just couldn't have cared less. It would show an utter lack of understanding of language to think that a computer could successfully “translate” an entire text in a way that would fool a native speaker into thinking it had originally been written in the target language. (Or perhaps he thought I wanted to spend as little time marking it as he wanted to spend producing it, and so would just put a random grade on it!)
I tell this story because learning Monkolé has reminded me of how difficult translation can be. Concepts which exist and are easily described in one language may be impossible to render in another. In Monkolé, for example, there are no such words as “brother”, “sister” or “sibling”. Instead, one speaks of “opposite-sex sibling”, “younger same-sex sibling” and “older same-sex sibling”. Which means that I use the same word to speak of my younger sisters as Marc does to speak of his younger brothers. So how do you translate “X the brother of Y” in the Bible, if you don't know which of them was the elder?
In a similar way, you can't say “son” or “daughter”, you have to say “boy-child” or “girl-child”. Which might sound unproblematic, until you realise that if you say to a Monkolé speaker, “Jesus is the boy-child of God” (you can't say “God's boy-child), it sounds to them as if God also has a girl-child! (The decision of the translators of the New Testament was to simply say “the child of God”, since a “perfect” translation isn't possible.)
Although this creates some frustrations when learning a new language, it is also fascinating, and gives a glimpse into some of the ways in which we think so differently from people from another culture.
There are of course lots of other difficulties which are encountered when translating, and I'm sure I will be writing more about them in the future!
As soon as I began to read, I burst out laughing, amused but not at all impressed. It was clear that the student in question had gone to a French website on his chosen subject, swiped the text, and fed it through an online translation machine to get an English "equivalent". The translation was so literal that I had no trouble back-translating the first line, googling it, and turning up the original website.
The student of course got zero for his piece of work, and I did have to wonder whether he really thought he'd get away with it, or whether he just couldn't have cared less. It would show an utter lack of understanding of language to think that a computer could successfully “translate” an entire text in a way that would fool a native speaker into thinking it had originally been written in the target language. (Or perhaps he thought I wanted to spend as little time marking it as he wanted to spend producing it, and so would just put a random grade on it!)
I tell this story because learning Monkolé has reminded me of how difficult translation can be. Concepts which exist and are easily described in one language may be impossible to render in another. In Monkolé, for example, there are no such words as “brother”, “sister” or “sibling”. Instead, one speaks of “opposite-sex sibling”, “younger same-sex sibling” and “older same-sex sibling”. Which means that I use the same word to speak of my younger sisters as Marc does to speak of his younger brothers. So how do you translate “X the brother of Y” in the Bible, if you don't know which of them was the elder?
In a similar way, you can't say “son” or “daughter”, you have to say “boy-child” or “girl-child”. Which might sound unproblematic, until you realise that if you say to a Monkolé speaker, “Jesus is the boy-child of God” (you can't say “God's boy-child), it sounds to them as if God also has a girl-child! (The decision of the translators of the New Testament was to simply say “the child of God”, since a “perfect” translation isn't possible.)
Although this creates some frustrations when learning a new language, it is also fascinating, and gives a glimpse into some of the ways in which we think so differently from people from another culture.
There are of course lots of other difficulties which are encountered when translating, and I'm sure I will be writing more about them in the future!
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