On an Aspect of Foreignness

By Hintha - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11570695

Whilst watching the situation in Myanmar, I saw a shot of a hospital ward sign in Burmese, subtitled in English as 'Male Ward'. The Burmese alphabet reminds me of bubble clusters settling on the page (or the sturdier medium of signage...) - there's something light and beautiful about it, yet a sense of purpose and tangibility the same as any other writing system. In the middle of the scene of devastation I was watching, the particular likes of which we don't see happen in 'the west', it felt odd to me to see this little translation, this bit of recognisable English.



http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Airport+Sign/Clive+Owen+Airport+Germany/ZLZz4J8sBoz

I got thinking of airports. I've been lucky enough to get abroad a couple of times in the last few years, and by and large, English has drawn these spaces together, on signage and often in dialogue, too. Obviously there are benefits. It's nice to be able to be understood when you 'don't have the words', but I feel guilty because I know why English has this status, and when I'm in a different country, I want to show respect by speaking the native language, and having English spoken back to me tends to smother the moment. It's no 'biggie', but it leaves me pondering the nature of foreignness. When language is so essential to identity, and to deeper concerns surrounding 'reality', its use impacts heavily upon one's experience - in short, one feels, in a way, like one is not 'properly abroad'. One feels as if the body has moved, but the mind isn't sure if it has kept up. Something like that...

Anyways, here comes the turn. The 'interesting bit', if I may be so bold as to say. I was recently booking some tickets from a French website. French happens to be the language I am most fluent in, after my mother tongue. However, the verbs alone in the usually habitual process of online shopping were alien to me. My school-taught stuff didn't cover the essential units of what I was grappling with. I made a couple of educated guesses, based on what I thought would be the etymologies of the unfamiliar words, because it's reasonable to think that a word that looks very similar to one you know would have a similar meaning, right? Well, after checking with a translator (and a good friend of mine who's a language whizz), I found out I was wrong with most of my attempts.

There were three phrases I stumbled on quite badly. "Ajouter au panier" was the first. I thought it meant 'return to something'. I was confident of 'ajouter', but didn't know what 'panier' meant. It turns out 'ajouter' means 'to add' - so I was wrong on that - and 'panier' is 'basket'. As someone who has grown up around bike enthusiasts, I should have known this, as it's so similar to 'panniers' - only one letter away, indeed - the bags bikers use on the back of their behicles. Second phrase was "je continue mes achats." If I'd thought about this a bit more straightforwardly, the 'je continue' bit must mean 'I am continuing', and I knew 'achats' must be my purchases ('acheter' means 'to buy'). Instead, I abstracted it a bit more to mean 'continue to payment', which is a perfectly normal thing to expect, so much so that I ignored linguistic logic - at my peril! The last thing was 'terminer ma commande'. 'Terminer', I thought, was 'terminate' in the sense of 'get rid of', y'know, 'delete', but in many contexts in English, even, 'terminate' means 'complete' - to terminate an order, or a train terminating at its destination. Let's just say, I didn't want to risk clicking this until I was absolutely sure what I was doing.

It was all a little bit scary. For all I knew, I could've been clicking on the 'charge me a million Euros for a can of French fog' button ('me chargez un million d'euros pour une canette de brouillard français', in case you ever need to know). It was frustrating, too, especially when I thought I knew what I was reading, but the things I was clicking took me to the 'wrong' part of the website. I was blaming technology before I began to think that I might have got it wrong. Also, contrarily, it was fun.

Finally - foreignness!

Langwidge Pt. 2

This part's a bit more melancholic and also doesn't come with an apology. In the first part I was talking about literary translations and some of the problems surrounding the process (that I can see, anyway. Maybe you don't have any problems with anything... good for you). What I really wanted to talk about was stuff like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which I'm trying to get clued-up on) and also talk about my language experiences (mainly an excuse to brag about decent GCSE grades :P ). So now that I've ruined all possible suspense, let's get cracking (don't worry, it won't take forever. Besides, there's always that little 'x' you could click in the... oh wait... no I already did that joke in the previous portion...).

Basically what I'm dealing with is a sense of mourning for my ability to speak different languages. I've had two years of Latin, two years of Spanish and five of French (since seven, five and five years respectively). Since then, my proficiency (if I can claim it so highly) has somewhat dwindled. I try and make up for it by using convoluted English words in everyday situations (I can't comment on how well that's going...), but it's not the same. I knew quite a lot about French, like how to speak in many tenses, talk about complex ideas (such as 'frogmen' - hommes grenouilles for those of you who are interested) and, much more importantly, I started to get a bit of confidence in being able to speak it. Where's all that now?

I chose not to do language at A Level. I'm not sure why. I chose subjects (like Physics) because I was interested in them, and wanted to get to know them better. But what I wish I'd have been told to look ahead to what I'd like to do with my life, rather than just what I'd like to do with the next couple of years. Physics, for me, has not only been 'too hard' but also had basically no impact on my life. Now all my French syntactical knowledge has withered, and alls I got is useless lexis (such as the word  for 'frogmen' - oh wait, I gone done that one already).

French was mandatory where I went to school from year one, but at GCSE we had to pick another (German, Spanish, Latin or Greek). I went for Spanish, as it's similar to Latin, but never took it that seriously. It was a lesson I had to go to, a qualification to get, and I didn't put as much effort in as with French. Now all I can think is, 'why did you waste that opportunity'?

At Edge Hill, my BA in English and Creative Writing involved language modules. They were richly varied, with elements of history, sociology and more, but in a sense there was too much variety and over the course of one module there wasn't enough depth in some ways (obviously they weren't designed to help you learn a language, but personally I felt a little directionless with all the slightly disparate elements that we looked at). Anyway, my point is that, again, I have a few nice nuggets of linguistic information, and I'm still interested in languages, but for the purposes of translation it wasn't so helpful (again, I'd like to stress that it was never meant to be helpful in such a way, and it WAS useful for many other things).

Now I'm in this place of desolation. I'd say it's a desert, but deserts can be beautiful. Things have withered and died and there's no turning back. It reminds me very much of Sujata Bhatt's 'Search For My Tongue' apart from the 'mother tongue' is not the 'problem', it's the other tongues (would they be called 'father tongues'? Surely not... sorry, I digress!). The tension that arises from not having a proper frame of reference for the mother tongue is the problem. How can I understand more than the (relatively) narrow sphere of English-speaking cultures without being FLUENT in another language? I've been getting very into American writers (Vonnegut, Bukowski, Kerouac) and yet what use is that for cultural diversification? Sure a lot of them are influenced by Eastern philosophies, but there's that voice at the back of my mind: if they've not communicated the original culture sufficiently then they are practically worthless. I wonder where I got that from?

Never mind, this isn't a blame game. This is a discussion (albeit one-sided :P ). Still not got onto Sapir-Whorf. Maybe next time. Thanks if you've  stuck around haha.

Goodnight. [Part 3]

Langwidge Pt. 1

More uncertainty (sorry. I'm genuinely, really, truly sorry but you can always just click that 'x' in the top right corner if it gets too much). Us folks on the MA have just been looking at literary translations (into different languages, rather  than different genres - which I did on part of my BA incidentally), and yeah it's a very thought-provoking endeavour. The questions, tensions and problems that arise are truly chewy considerations. For example, with poetry one of the big choices you have to make is whether to keep the rhyme scheme (obviously assuming there is one). Think about it: poems that rhyme already have their nature skewed into a kind of 'taut' form, so in translation the poem is further pulled and stretched semantically just for the 'benefit' of same-sounding sentence ends. But hey, you might want that.

I found it almost... unnerving (perhaps not the right word, but I work with what I'm given) that we were talking about what amounted to a responsibility to keep the original essence of the piece intact and no-one seemed upset by it. To me it's obvious that such a perfection is impossible. The phonemes all change (so it sounds very different), the shape of the poem is easily changed, the precise meanings of individual words change (imagine translating into a language whose conceptual mapping of colours is entirely different to ones own) and so on... I think the degree of similarity is kind of irrelevant. The translation's worth as a poem on its own merit is really the only thing that should matter. Then (healthy) discussion about why certain decisions were made can arise. At the end of the day, someone else could try and translate the same piece themselves. There just is no 'right answer', and surely that's the big message? It's as liberating as it is scary, that's a message we can all dance to (ANALOGY AGREEMENT ALERT).

We also talked about 'versions' which are apparently what happens when a writer translates something 'however they want' (I won't go into why that sounds to me like a meaningless thing to say). Basically, these poems have 'very little sense of the original' and were looked down upon in no uncertain terms when we discussed them. But why? Just like memory is a creative process, surely translation cannot fail to be also. At the very least, a translator should read the original they are working on, but after that, how can we be so sure about what's right and wrong? Art is (in an overly-basic and inexhaustive description) a reforming of sense perceptions that the brain has digested, so why not read the original and then, once that experience is in the mind, rewrite whatever you think. Does it make you 'correct' if you slave over every single word and letter? Every artist has to make decisions about what they're working on and the idea is that they know why they made them and can thus defend them. That's the essence, not simply 'I wanted to make it the same'. Strive for perfection if you want (it doesn't matter that you'll fail), but also what you feel is right should not be criticised solely on the grounds of not being like someone else's opinion of perfection.

I've not even got onto the main 'meat' of what I wanted to write about: language itself. I'll be talking about tongues in the next part, hope to see you there. [Part 2]