Quote:
Originally Posted by Roman
No kidding. There are so few doing any translations anymore and I'd venture to say that few people here have read or understood much of anything Alizée has said this year. My years of work attempting to learn French have at least somewhat payed off as I can often get the gist of conversation or written materials. It's amazing how we can learn a language and be so comfortable with it (most of the time), but have so much difficulty learning to understand another language. I guess I just forget all the work that went into learning English, for one thing.
The worst thing for me (besides just not getting around to reading some things or understand some audio interviews, etc.) is that I'm pretty sure I'll never really understand some of it. There is too much nuance born out of being closely involved with a culture and interacting in a language over the course of many years. It's not even just understanding the meaning of a word, but how it feels to hear that word. The word foutu is used in one song. It's a common word that one might translate as "screwed", but that's really too strong of a word as translation. The feeling that a French person might get upon hearing that word in a particular context is something that one might not figure out for years. We have arguments over our own language and so do they. What is arguable and what is considered standard? Who has the time to figure all that out?
Fortunately, if Alizée will make enough good music, it doesn't matter that much. The music can be just as good while understanding very little. Alizée listens to music with English lyrics, like so many French. Strange, but many probably don't understand much. I remember I was riding in the back of a car with a guy in France and some Led Zeppelin song was playing. Page was singing some lyrics in a very straight manner, but something he said seemed so ridiculous that I started laughing. The guy asked me why I was laughing and I had to explain that yes, I do like Zeppelin, but what he said was just funny. Maybe it's just me or maybe he just didn't get the very subtle joke. Sometimes I wish I could have Alizée's background so that I could understand what she understands.
|
I will never forget my High School English teacher teaching us about S. I. Hayakawa. He was a semanticist (and near the end of his life a Senator from California). He taught that it is impossible for two people to have a meaningful conversation unless they first defined all words they would use. Without this common definition, each would be interpreting what the other said accoring to their own definitions, rather than as the speaker actually intended it.
A lot of the conflict that occurs in this world is due to these misunderstandings.
If you are a Star Trek fan, do you remember the Star Trek episode (Darmok) where Picard tried to communicate with the Captain (Dathon) of the Tamarian ship. The language was so different from ours that the universal translator had no reference points from which to establish a meaningful translation. Picard finally learned to communicate by sharing experiences with the Captain.
It is much the same with all of us. We can learn the language. However, without the shared experiences, we are looking at a 3-dimensional language in a very 2-dimensional way.
Still. One has to start somewhere.
