[governance] MSism and democracy

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 12:43:28PM -0400, Deirdre Williams (williams.deirdre at gmail.com) wrote:

> I think each person should have the right, recognised and
> automatically accepted by others, to express him or her self in the
> language in which he or she feels most comfortable.

That is a beautiful ideal.

I'm afraid, however, that it isn't all that useful in practice.
It works well in a true bilingual setting, but not so well in
larger, really multilingual environments.

For what is the meaning of a right to use a language that won't be
understood?

If you want to be understood, you must use a language that your
audience will understand, one way or another.

You can use your own language, or one you're otherwise fluent with,
and take the risk it will be misunderstood due to audience's
poor skill at it and/or poor translation services,
or use a language they understand, and take the risk that
your poor command of it may cause misunderstandings.

Which is better, depends on the respective language
skills of you and your audience (and translators).

In general, however, at least in a context of technical,
political or such discussion, I find it is usually better
for the speaker to make an effort to make understanding
easier for the audience - speak their language if possible.

Moreover, counterintuitive though it may be, using a language you are
not too fluent with is frequently better, even (or perhaps especially)
when the listeners aren't all that fluent with it either
For the better your command of the language, the more you will use and
depend on nuances and subtleties that are likely to be missed by your
audience and machine translators alike.
Trying to phrase your thoughts in a foreign language may also clarify
them to yourself, force the meaning of the words to the surface so to
speak.

(It might be fun and perhaps constructive to decide that
everybody may use any language *except* their own.
Any takers?)

> There is also a danger in assuming English to be a lingua franca.
> This is because of the diversity of cultural baggage that the
> language has acquired during its global spread.

True, but that really applies to all languages, and if I may be forgiven
for saying so, Spanish and English share most of the same baggage.

As a simple example, I still find the gender-specific pronouns
and grammar constructs difficult - Finnish has no grammatical
gender nor different pronouns for sexes.
That alone causes a surprising number of translation problems,
and indeed it forces me to *think* differently in English,
keeping people's gender in mind all the time (I still occasionally
fail at that, causing confusion by using wrong pronouns).

There are other similar things, words and grammatical
constructs which simply don't exist in other languages
and which cannot be easily translated without losing at least
some of the meaning, let alone the elegance of the expression.

Yet I prefer to use English myself, rather than use Finnish with its
gender-ambiguous and other powerful and finely nuanced expressions
that translators (even human ones) tend do strange things with.

Of course, I already speak English fairly well. When I have to
speak to an audience whose language I don't know at all, I have to
rely on translators - but then I make a deliberate effort to use
simple language, avoid elegant expressions I know are likely
to get watered down or become incomprehensible in translation.

But the level of language skill needed before using a foreign language
is more effective than sticking to your own and relying on translation
is not all that high. (Somewhere above my Spanish at present, though...)

> At a practical level this must mean that the recipient of the
> communication has the obligation to translate, and we all have to
> hope that the meaning arrives safely. Automatic translation is a lot
> better than it used to be. Most importantly the recipient must be
> willing to try to understand, and willing to ask for clarification
> as necessary.

You are absolutely right in that that's the way it should be, we
should always strive to do that, to make a determined effort to
understand.

Unfortunately it does not work so well in real life, indeed it only works
very rarely. After all, the recipient has no obligation even to listen
the message, let alone to make an extra effort to translate it first -
and the simple fact that time is limited inevitably means people will
ignore most messages that are difficult for them to understand.
(I confess to having skipped most of the Spanish messagesin this
thread, for example.)

So in practice it tends to fall more on the speaker to make sure he or
she gets understood. That is especially so in political and other
comparable debates, where people really don't *want* to understand
anything that might contradict or shake their old opinions, sometimes
to the extent that they appear to make a determined effort to
misunderstand, even though it really is unconscious.

So, yes, by all means let's strive to make our best to understand
what others are saying, in whatever language.

But also, let's make an effort to express ourselves so as to be easily
understood, and not pretend we can really use our own language at all
times without increased danger of being misunderstood or not listened
to at all.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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