Lost in Translation

For Locke, language is flawed. The words in and of themselves contain no errors, but the ideas that they are meant to portray present challenges due to their complexities and our imperfect knowledge of them. Communication rarely, if ever, transfers a clear idea from one person to another. We are constantly battling with meanings and our own experiences. These experiences, and the way in which we interact with the world, make it impossible to be directly familiar with it. We experience our ideas of the world instead, and this makes conveying those ideas almost impossible. This is difficult enough while communicating in the same language, but the imperfections become evident when we attempt to translate words from one language to another.

"Complex ideas are not universal, as we can see by the difficulties of translating from one language to another. Many words name relationships, institutions, and cultural phenomena that do not exist elsewhere and therefore have no exact equivalent in another language" (Locke, 815). This is an enormous barrier between languages. We each experience ideas differently and have knowledge of ideas that others may not. Culture plays a great role in how we view the world and communicate, so when we go across cultures and languages, communication is far from easy.

Great examples of our culture-specific ideas are our metaphors and idioms. We have ways of speaking and conveying ideas that are more figurative than literal, and this presents complications. To give you a clear picture, I am writing a novel with a bilingual protagonist. Spanish creeps into the dialogue that I write, and so I always make sure to check in with my mother (whose first language is Spanish) to verify that the translations of my ideas are correct. One day I realized that I didn't know if the Spanish language had a saying that was equivalent to "Like father, like son." I called my mother, and she sat in thought for a whole five minutes before she came up with, "Del tal palo, tal astilla," which would literally translate to: From such stick, such splinter. The fact that she had such difficulty translating this idea made my mother curious, and so she began to look up sayings in her language. She sent me a lot of them, and some required long explanations because the English language didn't have any equivalents. It was an interesting conversation, and it made me realize how complicated translation can be.

Some would say that you could simply throw out idioms and metaphors and just speak plainly. But the problem with that is we don't just speak in metaphors. We think in them! According to Lackoff and Johnson, "... metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." If we think and act metaphorically, then how is it possible for us to communicate without the use of metaphorical language? It is a tricky subject, one that I am not entirely convinced has a solution! Perhaps language is doomed to be forever flawed, and translations forever imperfect. Perhaps we will only ever grasp our own personal ideas and meanings, and true communication will never be achieved. It's an unsettling thought!