Lost in Translation

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Ask anyone who has done some travel how paralyzing it is not to understand or to be understood. The sense of alienation can be devastating. Like Looking at a menu and pointing at something you are not sure what it is, or thinking you ordered something to get something else totally different.

In my first trip to England as Cadet on the M/V Serra Verde, I was in a store with the Chief Steward. I had a coldsore and he tried to help by asking the store attendant for a chap stick for me. Not knowing the word in English he pointed to me and made a motion in front of his lips with his hand. The store attendant looked puzzled thinking that he wanted lipstick for me.

Electronic translation is becoming quite popular as it gets more reliable. Word processing programs caries a tab that will translate any text to almost any language. But what happens when an English phrase is translated literally by computer?
As my written Spanish is not as good as my spoken Spanish, I send an email to the duty translator with the text I needed in Spanish. I walked to the office where the lady was doing her work and found to my amazement that she was using the computer to translate the text. However, the computer translation for “Dear Mr. Ramon” was “Querido Sr. Ramon”. Querido in Spanish means darling, beloved. I’m glad I caught the embarrassing mistake.

In a global environment the quest for meaning and security is seriously threaten by the ability to understand and be understood; easily what we express is lost in translation.  Antoine de Saint-Exupery in The Little Prince, a fable of love and loneliness, says that “Language is the source of misunderstanding.” Yet, the book was translated into more than 250 languages.

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