Why "Inter-translatability"?

I should have answered this question before. :)

Most people talk about the problem of translation. To me that is not only syntatically but semantically one-sided. It has a hint of hierarchy to it; it seems to privilege one language over another. You get the sense, at least initially, that we are talking about a one-way street. And that is usually how the problem is posed: how to translate a bit of another's language into one's own. And even when we want to translate something from our language into another, it is an-other language. We are a more or less competent speaker of our own language, certainly we want two things: to get our meaning across into the other language and to bring another language user's meaning into our own in terms that are understandable to us. But the first has, in a subtle way at least, a priority.

The asymmetry does not consist in the fact that we privilege the meanings in our own language over that of the other. Or that we do not understand that there are things in the other language that are as difficult to translate as there are things in the other to translate into ours.

The thing is, unless we are true bi-linguals, we live in one language, we inhabit one language. We do not easily, or even ever, pass over completely into the world established by another community of language users. For us there is really only one language, not in fact, but in priority, in our own subjectivity, again, if we are not a true bi-lingual. Inevitably, wanting to be understood becomes more important than wanting to understand.

We brush by things that arise in conversation that do not make immediate sense, we don't know what to do with these things, we refuse very often to struggle with them and you have to struggle, you have to engage, you have to ask. I have watched expats over the years in many foreign settings get angry when something does not get across clearly through an interpreter (the responses coming back do not seem to make sense). They will blame the interpreter; their voices will get louder; the pace of their speech will increase. They will blame everything and everyone but never consider that what might be the problem is that each language might not be in tune with other, each might be unable to capture all of what is meaningful in the other language (we will ignore here a further problem often encountered, the poverty of experience of the expat, his or her unconscious ethnocentrism). Often problems of translating bits of the other language that have a poor, or, no fit to our own are brushed by and we rush on, hoping, assuming that we have been fully understood. But we do want to be understood; that is always a priority. How many times have I heard: "Now you tell him exactly what I said!" but rarely: "I want to understand clearly what he is saying and what he wants."

Being understood is so often the main priority, that this is how the problem of translation (I would argue) most often takes forms: "how to get those guys to understand what we want!"

Subordinate to that and often lost in the midst of that more important project is the question of "What is that guy really trying to say to me in turn!"

My use of inter-translatability is a reminder to myself that the problem of translation goes two ways and it is not just that it is difficult for us to translate some things into Khmer in order to effectively communicate with Cambodians from our vantage point in English and within Anglo-Saxon culture, but that there may be many areas of Cambodian culture unavailable to us at first sight because there is such poor fit to the English semantic concepts that unify our use of language. The result: our failure to focus on these two problems with equal ferocity and equal patience.

Cambodian students wrestle with this problem everyday.

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