LOST IN TRANSLATION
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS TO ESCAPE THE PITFALLS OF A NEW LANGUAGE, OFTEN WITH HILARIOUS RESULTS BY COLM MEANEY CSsR
T
he Bible begins with the creation of everything that exists. How is this creating done? Does God overcome some primordial, recalcitrant demonic force? No, although such accounts are found in the book of Psalms. In the book of Genesis, God creates simply by speaking: “God said ‘let there be light’, and there was light” (Gen 1:3). And so it proceeds for the first six days. The creation of everything, including humans, is accomplished simply through words. And the intriguing fact is that, among all that has been created, we humans are unique in having the same power of speech. I take this to mean that in having the ability to communicate with one another with words, we are
30 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022
enjoying a divine-like power. Of course, such power can be used both for good and ill, hence the teaching of St Paul, “do not use harmful words in speaking, only the kind that will build up” (Eph 4:29). And in the letter of James, we read, “With our tongue we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God” (Jm 3:8-9). So clearly, our power of speech is an ambiguous one, able to produce words of beauty or abuse, words of encouragement or anxiety. When I arrived in the Philippines in 1986, I studied at a language school run by the Maryknoll missionaries (New York), staffed entirely by locals. The five-month course gave us a fine grounding in
one of the major languages in the country (spoken by about 30 million). It was like being back at school: we had lessons from 8am12 noon, then lunch and siesta (a break from the tropical heat), followed by classes again from 2-4pm. Each evening we had homework: for example, to practise our grammar, we completed sentences like “I went/ will go to the shop” and so on. Actually the languages, two of which I speak with some fluency, are quite simple grammatically: just a past, present, and future tense, and you read the words exactly as they are written on the page (no silent letters, like the letter ‘b’ in lamb). The challenge in the Filipino languages is the vastness of their vocabularies:
every day, in the hinterlands, I learn new words. For instance, for our verb ‘to carry’ they have multiple words: to carry in the hand, under the oxter, on the shoulder, on top of the head, across the shoulders (a pole, with buckets on either end, bringing water from the well), two or more people carrying an object (as in the Gospel story of the paralytic being lowered through the roof, having been carried on his stretcher by his companions). To be sure, the generic verb for carry (dala) could be used for all of these cases, but what a shame to neglect the richness of the language. The various languages have lovely touches. For example, they abound in onomatopoeia: the verb ‘to knock’ is tuktuk; the
