25/3/11

LANGUAGE, MEANING AND TRANSLATION:
We use language to describe things, express our feelings, persuade people, tell jokes, observing things around us and to write. We don't just use language in the form of speech or writing, but we use body language to convey a message. If you think about how cavemen or two people who don't understand each others language, they will use their hands or body to try communicate their thoughts.


What I find interesting about a language is how did we get from A to B? Meaning, how did we get from grunting at each other, to creating symbols, that meant something? How did an English speaker determine the exact meaning of a Japanese word? This really interests me because yes, I do understand that there were three of the same phrases in three different languages on a plate written by the Egyptians around 3000BC and yes I understand that to translate Hyroglifics, Greek scholars used the second phrase, which was in Ancient Greek. What gets me, is how did someone of and English decent, start to translate for example, the Japanese word 言語 (language) into English, if they have never spoken or heard Japanese before? How did we first find translations for words in other languages that use characters? I'm asking so many questions, but finding it hard to answer them because I don't understand, but want to know more!


Not only are there problems understand our own language with so many meanings allocated to one word, but we have other 'meanings' and ways of putting a sentence together using idioms or metaphors or euphemisms, which makes it almost impossible to translate from another language to mean the same thing!


It's hard enough to communicate our thoughts into words clearly in our own language, so imagine how meanings must get lost in translation. Context is such a major part of our understanding in other language. If we are just given a few words in say spanish, we may not be able to make much sense of what the message is trying to convey. But with some background information in the sentence, we many be able to translate it back into English, so that we can understand it. Another problem with translating back into English, or from English to Spanish, is that if you translate a phrase literally into the other language, it will not sound normal! For example, "My friends house" in Spanish is "Mis amigos de las casas". A literal translation of that would be 'my friends of the houses', which obviously is not grammatically correct in English. So when we start to use things like idioms, other languages may not have the same idiom. For example, "tongue tied", which means you can't speak properly from mixing words together, may mean in another language there tongue is literally tied together. Hence, the loss of meaning in translation.