broken babelfish
some wiring in the brain makes it effortless to learn a language during the first few years of life--then a switch is pulled and suddenly 23+ years later you find yourself mired in the endless confusion of trying to master 84 different subjects and verb tenses.
my spanish is improving much more slowly than i´d hoped. never a natural polyglot, i find it especially difficult to separate meaning from the associations that my background automatically attaches to each phrase. i rarely use the command form on my roommates, though they rely on it regularly (what would the currier etiquette consultant say if she overheard me ordering one of my dining companions to pass me the water?). without the benefit of cultural history and context, even the most technically perfect translation often fails to transmit the original message in its entirety.
my main channel of communication with my parents now is email; it’s pretty one-sided given how slowly my dad types. i treasure his terse, 20-word emails and my mom’s handwritten letters in which she apologizes profusely for her grammar. the last one she wrote advised me to “read with your heart, then you will understand.”
some things are impossible to lose even in translation.
my spanish is improving much more slowly than i´d hoped. never a natural polyglot, i find it especially difficult to separate meaning from the associations that my background automatically attaches to each phrase. i rarely use the command form on my roommates, though they rely on it regularly (what would the currier etiquette consultant say if she overheard me ordering one of my dining companions to pass me the water?). without the benefit of cultural history and context, even the most technically perfect translation often fails to transmit the original message in its entirety.
my main channel of communication with my parents now is email; it’s pretty one-sided given how slowly my dad types. i treasure his terse, 20-word emails and my mom’s handwritten letters in which she apologizes profusely for her grammar. the last one she wrote advised me to “read with your heart, then you will understand.”
some things are impossible to lose even in translation.