Some years ago I was flying from Beijing to the US after spending a year in China, and standing in front of me in the emigration line at the Beijing airport were a rotund American husband and wife.
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The man was agitated, clicking his tongue and rolling his eyes. The woman’s eyes were glazed, staring into the distance. But as the man’s rolling eyes looked up, he saw something that really pushed him over the edge. “These signs are complete lies too,” he told his wife, “that English sign says, ‘China Immigration Inspection’, but there are four Chinese words there. All these signs are like that.” She nodded; I rolled my eyes. The words in question were actually characters pronounced zhōng guó biān jiǎn; literally, this means something like, “Middle Kingdom Border Check”. Different words, sure, but a pretty similar meaning. I didn’t pay any more attention at the time but l later realised that this man was making an assumption which is as common as it is wrong: words correspond one-to-one between two languages. We can even see this assumption reflected in the way law courts handle translators (who are needed, for example, when a defendant speaks a language other than English natively).
Often, courts actually require that translations should be word for word. For every Thai conjunction, an English conjunction. It sounds good in theory. Unfortunately, though, words don’t typically match up across languages, unless they’re very closely related.
One problem with “word matching” across languages has to do with meaning, while the other has to do with form. On meaning, it turns out that every language has its own “meaning space”, and the ways languages carve their words out of these meaning spaces turn out to be very different. Any casual acquaintance with a European language learned in school turns up words like German “Schadenfreude”. Dictionaries might translate this as something like “malicious joy”, but that doesn’t make much sense in English, and doesn’t even do justice to the German. Better would be a long-winded descriptive phrase like “pleasure taken at someone else’s misfortune” (insert your own snide comment about the World Cup results here).
On form, it turns out that some languages like to put one tiny meaning in each tiny word, while others like to jam in everything and the kitchen sink. Chinese is one of the first type; for example, English ‘public prosecutor’ is pronounced in Chinese as gōng sù rén; literally, ‘public appeal person’ - note how the English suffix ‘-or’ is represented in Chinese as a distinct word ‘person’. For the second type, consider this verb in Minyong, an Eastern Himalayan language: goktakiramhikaato. This literally means “(he) had a go at calling out after (him), but it was in vain”. That’s right: all of those English meanings fit into that single Minyong word. Pity the translation literalist who ever has to stand in the emigration line at a Minyong airport.