The Flaws of Translation

One fact is evident to anyone who has attempted to use Google Translate for anything more than a word or, at most, a short phrase: at best, it lacks precision. This shortcoming is hardly the fault of the designers behind such programs. Far from it - translating text or speech of any significant complexity almost invariably leads to a distortion or even a loss of much of the intended meaning. This occurs for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, languages do not always follow a one-to-one correspondence structure. Even in the case of English, which boasts an exceptionally extensive vocabulary as far as languages go, there still exists in other languages a countless number of words with no direct translation into English. The classic example of this phenomenon is the German word schadenfreude. Google translates this word as "malicious joy", a rather clunky attempt at conveying the rough meaning of the term. Indeed, schadenfreude has made its way into the English vocabulary as a loan word precisely because of this lack of a corresponding phrase. Even words that seemingly do exhibit such a one-to-one correspondence may hold subtle albeit important nuances of meaning between the two languages compared. The French bonne nuit and the Spanish buenas noches both translate to "goodnight", but there lies a noteworthy distinction in the usage of the two phrases. While French and Spanish are, as Romance languages, closely related, buenas noches is appropriate as a greeting, while bonne nuit is not. In this respect, the French bonne nuit is closer in meaning to the thoroughly unrelated English "goodnight" and Chinese 晚安 (Wǎn'ān), highlighting how even relatively similar languages can conceal substantial nuances.

Going further than minor discrepancies across the vocabularies of languages, some languages lack entire concepts than range from useful to necessary in other languages. The English pronouns "we" and "you", for instance, can prove exceptionally inconvenient in their total reliance on context. In the case of "we", it is unclear without context whether the group denoted by "we" includes the addressee. In the case of "you", many other languages make not one, but two important distinctions that, again, are lacking in English without the proper context. As an example, Spanish has two separate words for a polite "you" (usted) and a personal "you" (tú). There also exist two different words for a singular "you" ("tú") and a plural you (vosotros). A similar distinction occurred in Early Modern English in the form of the now-archaic, singular/personal thou.

Even within languages can the use of such concepts vary. While Spanish maintains a separation of the personal plural vosotros and the polite plural ustedes in Spain, many Latin American countries have eliminated the vosotros form and instead utilize ustedes for both the personal plural and polite plural forms of "you". Such a seemingly trivial difference can prove to be yet another type of linguistic pitfall that may be challenging to avoid when translating.

Ultimately, despite all its flaws, translation is a crucial tool in an ever-increasingly connected world. However, what can be changed is how we approach learning new languages to minimize falling into such linguistic traps. Where possible, language acquisition should occur at an early age, when our minds are at their most malleable and, consequently, when it is easiest to adapt to interlinguistic mismatches. What we should avoid at all costs is teaching languages exclusively as a direct translation of one's native tongue, an approach which, while initially convenient, quickly exhausts its ability to push a learner toward fluency.