Saturday, April 4, 2009
Week 11, Question 3
The concept in this chapter that I found most interesting was the portion in text that Trenholm discusses language style. I completely love this topic because I am minoring in speech pathology and the particular part of the text that I enjoyed is that many people believe that when you translate a phrase in English to a different language, it means the same thing. However, given the cultural background, direct translation of the terms doesn’t mean the same thing. Language is more than just a string of words, but culture adds to the language in every culture. This is why barriers in language are more complex and difficult than a person thinks.
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I also found that idea of translating languages to be very interesting. Culture and customes are very different and that does lend itself to language as well. Additionally, words in other languages can have more than one meaning. The tone and context of the conversation are some indicators of how the word choice will come across. Even the most skilled person can make mistakes when speaking a foriegn language. Learning about the culture and customes will save someone from a lot of embarrasment and miscommunication.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of direct translation really interests me too because I'm from a multicultural background--my mother is Chinese, and my father is Caucasian-mix. While my mom speaks English, I remember translating a few things to my dad and having trouble with it. There are little phrases in Chinese that really don't mean anything in English. There are also phrases in English that mean things completely different when translated. Female dog in the dialect of Chinese that I speak doesn't mean anything too offensive, it just means that someone is grumpy. However, female dog in English is bitch (just for the sake of example!) and that's considered pretty offensive.
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