Lost in Translation

I apologize for the lack of posting on Italy I, Paris and Italy II they will come along eventually I'm just lazy but here is a little something to wet you appetite.



Yesterday was my first foray into the committee meeting realm and to be honest there was so much shit going on in there I don't even remember what the meeting was about.

First off the fact that someone can translate from one language to another amazes me. You have to translate while at the same time remember what is being said so you can continue to translate. I would imagine that this would be incredibly exhausting and strenuous for the mind and can't even begin to comprehend the pressure that they feel.

Now that being said I was even more so amazed when the first six speakers in the meeting, who all spoke different languages, were translated by a single translator. How does one know 6 languages fluently and not go crazy? I mean I struggled for 6 years to learn Italian and I know next to nothing and this guy knows 6?

Now the funniest part of the meeting was the effects that translation had on the attempts at humor made by the MEPs.

Every time an English speaker would begin to talk, I would take off the translation headphones for obvious reasons. Well in the front there was this Irish guy who was a fucking riot, but every time he made a joke I was the only one who would laugh right away but then 4 seconds later the whole room would start laughing because of the translation delay. And some times people wouldn't laugh at all which confused me until I found my self on the other side of the situation.

There was this Czech guy who kept making the room burst out laughing every time he would talk except when it translated for me there wasn't any humor in the statement which puzzled me. Was my humour just that much different than European humor? Then it hit me, humor just doesn't always translate, certain words and sayings have different meanings from language to language so if the translators translates it literally then the humor will be lost.

It never really hit me until that moment that so much from culture to culture is lost simply because we can not express the true meaning adequately in any language other than our own. But then again thats what makes our cultures so different even if we do not have political borders (such as the EU is becoming) we have the borders of language to restarain us.