Lost in translation

It's probably not neurotic to lose sleep over the possibility of creating an international incident through circumstances entirely beyond one's control. Or, at least, so I tell myself.

Most such worries have at least a grain of truth lying somewhere in their distant background, even if that grain won't prove sufficiently irritating to generate a pearl of wisdom. The grain that prompted this post is that I work with many Chinese scientists, and dearly love the relationships (and guanxi) we've created together over the years. But the language barrier between English and Chinese is greater than the barrier between most Western languages, so the likelihood of miscommunication is much higher.

I occasionally notice certain linguistic patterns that suggest a specific source of error. The grain in this case is my strong suspicion that there are several Chinese-English dictionaries (or perhaps standardized curricula in China for English as a second language) that contain clear errors in translation. This likely resulted from a simple fact of human nature. (Simple, at least, if you're willing to concede that publishers are human.) Ideally, the creation of such dictionaries should be a collaborative effort between at least two fluently bilingual language experts, with each providing expert advice on the nuances of their native tongue. But given the economic realities of publishing, I expect that the dictionary publishers or instructional designers in question hired a single Chinese expert in their native language. Errors would be inevitable under these conditions. Then, as subsequent dictionary authors used that first dictionary to guide their own efforts, the errors would propagate. (Call this research, or call it plagiarism, according to your nature.)

Thus, we end up with significant errors such as using "few" and "rare" to mean "none" or "nonexistent". There are a few other such errors I've noticed over the years but neglected to record, and since I'm overdue for my next cup of coffee, they're not coming to mind. I'll add them here later if good examples come to mind. This specific error is fairly innocuous, but I can imagine that lying submerged in the collective consciousness, like Cthulhu slumbering in R'lyeh, lie more exciting translation errors for me to discover.

If I'm lucky, the consequences of stumbling over such an error will resemble those in the classic (not entirely safe for work) translation dictionary skit by the inimitable Monty Python crew. There are worse fates.

I no longer have the tragic delusion that human communication is in any way objectively correct or certain to succeed. I don't even assume that the majority of my readers will take the desired meaning from my words. But this fear of committing a hideous error is why I sweat the details of my e-mail to non-English clients about twice as hard as I sweat the details for my English clients.

(My current project is to learn a few score words of Icelandic before spending a couple weeks in Iceland next summer. If my blog entries abruptly end in late June of next year, you can safely infer that I stumbled across a mis-translation that was best avoided when attempting to communicate with the descendants of Viking warriors.)