[governance] MSism and democracy

[Carlos A. Afonso]

Babel reloaded? :)

--c.a.

On 06/09/2011 05:23 AM, Tapani Tarvainen wrote:
> 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.
> 
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