Contextually Speaking

~One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way. – Frank Smith~

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The more you explore a language, the more odd translations and mistranslations you come across. There are multiple ways to say something in any language, and it’s almost always possible to spot a non-native speaker by the way they write. Non-native English speakers are easily found out by how they use indefinite articles; this seems to be the last piece of the puzzle to be really understood in English. But I can tell you from experience, that even if I use the right grammar and appropriate vocabulary in a foreign language, I still can’t write an email like a native German or French person would. It’s sometimes really frustrating, but it helps to laugh at some of the epic fails speakers of other languages have when trying to translate into English.

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English is possibly one of the most flexible languages, with endless synonyms and euphemisms, often stolen from Shakespeare or even from other languages. English has brilliantly usurped Greek, French, German, Latin, and even some Asian words and has the audacity to act like it was always part of the English family. Anglos don’t obsess like continental Europeans do by having committees on how to keep their language pure – because it never was to begin with. However, this makes it even harder for non-native speakers to master English. At the very least, it should make others sympathetic when people try to speak English. 

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A mistake people often make is trying to translate things word for word from the new language into their mother tongue. This is tedious work and largely unnecessary. One of the reasons living in the foreign country is helpful is because you are forced to be immersed and to listen to whole conversations, gleaning at first only a few words that you understand. This starts to create patterns in your brain, which can shake out some of the grammatical issues. I know this is true because when I write an email in another language, I’ll read it back to myself and may hear a word is misplaced because my language memory knows I’ve heard the word used in a different place in a similar sentence multiple times before.  

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The same rule applies to reading and writing. If you read an article or a short story (novels are generally for pleasure and most people I know prefer to read novels in their mother tongue, but there are always exceptions!), it is useless to translate every word. In my lessons, I’ll have my students read a paragraph and perhaps ask them to summarize the text in their native language. Then I’ll have them select a few words to translate – but it is unnecessary to translate the whole text! First, you will lose something with the idioms and certain phrases that for whatever reason don’t work in the other language. Instead you should focus on phrases and the overall summary of a text. This will teach you much more about syntax, grammar, and general flow of a language than wasting time trying to understand every word.

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