How many of you study foreign languages? I’ve always found it can be at once terribly rewarding and horribly frustrating. At times, however, it can be downright hysterical, and after spending nearly twenty years overseas, I’d like to take a few moments to share some of my more comedic foreign language experiences.
Now, I’m not talking, necessarily, about the signs written in poor English I’ve seen all over the world. Those deserve a blog all their own, I think, though my all-time favorite might be a pet store on the west side of Tokyo that labeled itself “Dog Whiz”. No . . . that wasn’t intentional . . . but made me late to school one day ‘cause I was laughing so hard.
No, I’m talking more about those lost in translation moments when one human talks to another through a third person. If you ever played “telephone" as a kid, you can understand what happens to a simple message passed through even a common language. Now add in another language, another set of cultural cues and norms, and hilarity can ensue. And that’s assuming the interpreter is a witting player. It can get far worse when that’s not the case.
My first time being called upon to interpret from Japanese into English, everyone there seemed to be aware that was my role . . . everyone but me, that is. And so escorting a U.S. dignitary to a field site the local Japanese commander begins briefing what his unit is doing, essentially providing water purification service in the wake of an earthquake. This guy lovingly lays out his mission, the actions of his men, a description of how the purification equipment works . . . his hobbies, favorite ice cream flavor, and his family genealogy going back twenty generations . . . on and on, it seemed. To be honest, I still don’t know exactly all that he said since, being in-country at that point for a sum total of two weeks, I’d stopped trying to follow him about three paragraphs in. That’ll teach me, for at the end of a monologue worthy of a Tonight Show episode, every head in the audience turns . . . and looks at me. Seriously?!?
My co-workers at the time actually made a video of the whole visit—given the senior rank of the dignitary we were escorting—and on the digital recording you get to see my very nervous “translation” start out with “Well . . . you see, sir . . . there’s this water . . .” And that’s as far as my Japanese boss allowed me to get, sensing a real train wreck in the making. Funny, unless you’re me thinking I’m going to get fired less than a month into the job! Funnier still, my “friends” in the unit saved that very special video clip and played it at my farewell two years later. You guys suck . . . you know who you are!! :)
But I’ve been around long enough to observe others, even professional interpreters, commit some pretty crazy gaffes as well. Sitting through a multi-national set of talks once, I heard the U.S. briefer discuss setting up a pilot program for this or that function. No problem, right, but my buddy and I sitting next to one another could have sworn we heard something strange in the Japanese translation. The same something strange. When it happened again a few minutes later we had to interject as the translated “Pirate Program” was really throwing some people in the audience for a loop! Imagine the headlines all across Japan the next day, “U.S. Trains Pirates . . . Arrrggghhh!”
Still other errors occur in part because minor differences in pronunciation seem less pronounced to those learning a new language. I found this out the hard way upon moving into a house in Tokyo some 11 years ago. The security company called me at work to inform me that one document in the stack of papers required to set up their system hadn’t been signed. The nice young lady on the other end of the phone then clearly informed me that a chicken would bring the document to me to sign. “Uh . . . a chicken?” I answered, to get in return “Yes, a chicken.” She seemed to really know what SHE was talking about, but I was determined to understand.
This led to several iterations of me going “A chicken?” and her responding the same way, “Yes, a chicken.” I felt like I got louder and enunciated more clearly with each repeated question, but she was unperturbed in her insistence that her company’s chicken would solve this problem to everyone’s satisfaction. Clearly I was missing something—and frankly, she was making me hungry—so I finally gave up, looking forward to meeting this corporate chicken that evening.
I swear, understanding hit me as soon as I set the phone down—and I must have turned eight shades of red. In Japanese, the word chicken is pronounced to-ri-ni-ku. To take something somewhere (I don’t know . . . like a document that needs signing, maybe) is pronounced to-ri-ni-i-ku. Idiot!! There’s NO WAY that nice young lady didn’t go home that evening and tell her husband the story of the moron SHE had to deal with that day!
While normal exchanges can easily cause these types of misunderstanding, the use of idiomatic expressions almost guarantees it. Sitting in a military course once, we had a few foreign officers in our class. Working our way silently through a problem, at a certain point the foreign officer behind me quickly pulls out his electronic dictionary and starts banging away. Again and again his typing becomes more energetic with each apparently failed attempt. This was a timed and graded exercise after all. Finally, unable to take it anymore, our instructor asks, “Is there a problem Captain so-and-so?” To which the poor guy looks up in utter exasperation and says “This says ‘night has fallen’ . . .” Our instructor nods in response. “How can night fall?!?” At which point the whole class completely lost it.
When learning a new language people often seem to drag the rules of their native tongue along with them. In the Korean example, then, this manifests itself most often in an inability to separate an “R” from an “L”. This is something I even included at one point in the dialogue of “Persian Blood" as this one linguistic stumbling block seems to account for so much fun. For the benefit of those of you who don’t already know, however, in the Korean language, there is just one letter for “R” and “L” and it’s pronounced with more of a roll of the tongue. Thus when I was young and had my math homework checked I was told “This is long.” To which I responded, “It’s supposed to be.” It was long division, after all. But neither of us was really understanding what the other was saying. Once again, full comprehension didn’t come until after the fact . . . when my math homework was returned to me virtually dripping in the teacher’s red ink! Wrong indeed.
Finally, cultural norms often dictate that others may use our language in ways we never intended. My favorite example is a very common phrase in Japanese. It translates literally as “That will be difficult.” What it means, however, is “no.” Not maybe, not possibly, but no, no, a thousand times no. This simple, overly polite phrase, if translated literally—which it usually is—has derailed more coordination meetings than I can count. The American invariably asks for something hard to achieve. The Japanese counterpart responds with air audibly sucked through closed teeth followed by “That will be difficult.” And the American leaves the meeting thrilled to death. “Difficult” is something we can do, right? And yet what was actually said—in no uncertain terms if you know what to look for—was “no”.
Spending so much time learning and working with foreign languages, I absolutely love a line from the Tom Selleck movie “Mr. Baseball”. In that film, Selleck plays a fading American professional baseball player traded to a Japanese team and the situations in which he finds himself truly reflect, at times, the average foreigner’s first-time experience in Japan. At one point, however, utterly frustrated with his interpreter, Selleck’s character explodes “Just ‘cause you and I both speak English, doesn’t mean we’re speaking the same language.”
So true . . . so true.
M. G. Haynes