Readers, I cannot tell a lie. It was I who cut down that cherry tree.

What did the above statement mean to you? Some people might see it as a sort of confession, my confessing to an act that you might not have been aware of, but without much in the way of context. However, for the readers versed in American history and mythology, that statement likely evoked the words of George Washington, declaring to his father that he chopped down a cherry tree and being a shining pillar of honesty in the process. So, perhaps the question for them was twofold: Why is he talking about this, and why is he pretending to be George Washington?

Well, not to disappoint, but I’ve never cut down a cherry tree, and, considering that the statement was false, I apparently can tell a lie. However, I can prove a point with it as well. For those who were familiar with George Washington’s quotation, that statement had an entirely different meaning than for those of you who missed the reference. At least a part of the meaning in that statement was dependent on your knowing something about the background behind my word choice.

Now, imagine you walk up to a coworker, relieved at the successful conclusion of a long, drawn out project. Smiling, you enthusiastically proclaim “It’s over!!” He stares at you for a second, and promptly breaks into tears and runs off to the men’s room. You just stand, mortified, unsure what you said or did to get such a reaction, until later, he comes back, still teary eyed, and explains that only a week ago, his now ex-wife had used those same words as she presented him with unexpected divorce papers, and that your using the unintentionally called back on that. He explains that he too is happy that the project is over, and apologizes for the breakdown.

There’s really nobody at fault here, this was just an unfortunate usage of a phrase which had a different meaning to each party in the communication. This is also a very extreme example, but still, it emphasizes the fact that meaning and connotation of words can be very individual, even on top of the widely agreed “definition” among speakers.

When you walk up to a person on the street and mention the term “dog”, their interpretation will be very different depending on their life experiences. Whereas one person with a phobia might get apprehensive, a veterinarian might smile or show concern, another person might think of Sparky, their childhood pet, and a dog breeder might start picturing a specific breed or characteristic. It’s unlikely that somebody would think of one characteristic or image to the point where they wouldn’t get the reference to a generic domesticated canine, but it’s also very unlikely that a person would only see a generic, faceless, breedless dog with no connotation.

I’m sure there are some voices in semantic theory that would disagree (and they’re welcome to comment or email me to let me post their opinion), but often, the “meaning” of a word for every individual person is the sum of their past experiences with that word and what it might have symbolized. If a child got bitten by a dog, the word “dog” might have a terrible connotation the week after, but if they were to go on to work at an animal hospital, that connotation might be replaced or altered.

One could pretend that all words have a nice, easy, abstract meaning, found in the dictionary and independent of the people using it. However, in practice, every word has both a general meaning, shared by most speakers of the language, and then a more individual shade of meaning, unique to their experiences. Knowing the context, both in which you’ll use a word, and in which the listener will hear it, is vital to understanding what to say, when.

This is easier said than done, of course, because you can very seldom get in the head of your listener to know just what a given word means to them. However, it’s always worth keeping in mind, because once you do, saying “I am glad for the successful completion of our newest project” to your newly divorced co-worker doesn’t sound nearly as awkward, does it?

So, I was sent a magnificent link today. Nominally, it’s an article about offensive terms sneaking their way onto personalized (or “vanity”) license plates. Some of them are a little humorous, but one in particular jumped out at me. From the letter (uncorrected):

“I would like to share my deepest concern about custom plates that your department issuing to the customers.”
…
“I would like to give you an example of such custom plate. The number is “CTO XYEB” registered in NY. In Russian it mean “one hundred penises” in a very dirty language.”

Now, having studied some Russian in the past, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at this. Although it could easily have been an unfortunate random letter combination, the English letters “CTO XYEB” correspond to the cyrillic letters spelling a vulgar equivalent of “one hundred penises” (pronounced, “Sto huyev”) in Russian, and with amazing grammatical correctness, too.

In Russian, when counting an object, the declension of the word changes (a different ending is placed on it). So, one object is in the Nominative case singular, two is in the nominative plural, and five or more is in the Genitive Case plural, changing ‘Odin huy’ (one penis) to ‘Sto huyev’ (one hundred penises). So, in addition to be quite dirty, it’s quite grammatical.My apologies, by the way, for the transliteration. Cyrillic fonts seem to break my blogging software.Whether some enterprising young Russian speaker slipped one past the DMV, or whether a random motorist was stricken with a rather interesting random combination, this is another magnificent example of cross-linguistic translation and censorship difficulties, and a good reminder that with thousands of languages out there, it’s tough not to offend somebody sometimes.

So, if you see a brown Mercedes in Brooklyn with this magnificent license plate, you’re welcome to inform the driver of the mistake and recommend a trip to the DMV, give him or her a few choice words in Russian, or, if you’re like me, fall down laughing in the gutter. It’s all good, really.

So the other day, I was sitting in the hallway of my University’s Residence Halls, around midnight, and listening to a theology discussion which the RA’s were having. There were people of all different backgrounds there, but the most vocal was a young man of the Mormon faith. At one point, the question arose of Bible translation and the fallibility of human translators.

The young Mormon piped up with a very innovative analogy on translation which he learned in Seminary, which I felt was quite interesting. I’ll roughly paraphrase below:

The word of God is a lot like a picture hanging on a bulletin board. It only has one tack to secure it [representing the Old and New Testament], so anybody can spin it around as they’d like, changing the perspective, even though the picture stays the same. The translators each tilt it a bit differently, and it’s tough to see exactly what the right orientation is.

For us [those of the Mormon Faith], the Book of Mormon is a second tack. It provides a second hold, and keeps you from spinning the picture. Whenever there’s a question about the perspective and translation in one, you can consult the other. What might be unsure with one tack, is securely locked with two.

Whether you believe in the validity of either work, this is an interesting analogy. It seems to imply a distinct split between the actual “word” or message of God, and the written words used to pass it on, much like the split between concept and language used to describe it.

A similar idea is actually used frequently in the translation of a seminal work in Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhicharyavatara (’Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’) by Shantideva. Very early after its transcription (originally in Sanskrit), two highly authoritative versions were created of the work, one in Tibetan, and one in Sanskrit, and both are treated as equal by the Buddhist community. In modern translations, many of the translators choose to base their work off one version or the other, but use the other version to clarify difficult passages. My personal favorite translation, by Stephen Batchelor, was based on a 12th Century Commentary on the Tibetan text, but uses the Sanskrit for clarification in footnotes. When you’re dealing with differences as extreme as that between “May all women become men” and “May all women attain the rights and privileges of men”, a point of clarification is wonderful.

Now, let’s use a similar idea in a secular sense. I would like to describe an event, something complex, emotional, and generally slightly vague. Take, for example, an account of one’s first day leaving for College. Imagine a bilingual author were to write the story, once in, say, English, and once in Spanish. Not so much translating one into the other, but actually telling the story twice (with an effort to include much of the same information in both). Would the Spanish be a “second tack” for the English version and vice-versa? Could one use the Spanish to clarify the English ambiguities, and vice-versa? Most importantly, would another bilingual reader have a better idea what the author meant by reading both versions, rather than just one?

The more I look at it, translation seems messier and messier. I’ve begun to suspect that there is no such thing as a one-to-one translation, and that any time you switch languages or rephrase, something is lost or gained. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it, like all other things, needs to be studied further.

I hope this post made sense. If not, maybe I’ll try writing the same thing right next to it in Spanish. If it helps, I’ve just found a thesis.