Every Language Chops Up the World Differently
There is a massive rift that divides the United Kingdom. It splits families, church groups, political parties, and even friends. It pits people against their fellow humans and can lead to heated debates.
Just what do you call the evening meal?
Some people, for the sake of tradition, insist on calling it “tea”. This has good cultural precedent. In the UK, we have cream tea (a cup of tea and cakes), high tea (a cup of tea, with bread vegetables and other stuff), and afternoon tea (tea, sandwiches and scones). With all those meals already including the word “tea”, why not have another?
Others, perhaps thinking that using “tea” to refer to a meal is a bit odd, insist on calling the evening meal “dinner”. This reduces confusion for those times when someone invites you “for tea”. To this day, the debates between the camps continues, with no peaceful end in sight. One group are happy for the word “tea” to cover the drink and a meal. The other make a clear distinction between the two.
Perhaps, if they say down for a cup of tea, it would be fine.
What does this have to do with professional interpreting and multilingual church? The answer is simple. If people can’t agree on which concepts a single word covers when using the same language, what will happen when people speak different languages?
The Simple Way of Viewing Languages
It would be much easier if languages worked like this. First, everyone could sit down and decide on all the concepts that would be needed. Maybe we need words for “bird”, “blue”, “social media”, and “expressing a view respectfully in 140 characters or fewer”. Then every language could go away and decide on its word for each of those concepts. Once that was done, it would be an easy job to go from one language to another. All you would need to do is swap one word for another that means the same thing.
Except, that isn’t how it happened. Not only do we have the difficulty of different animals living in different places so some languages don’t even need a word for “haggis”! Languages also decided to divide the world in different ways. In English, for example, a woolly animal in a field is a “sheep”. If that same animal happens to be in a delicious pie, we call it “mutton”. In French, both can happily be called “mouton”.
This all means that we can’t see interpreting as the art of swapping one word for another really quickly. It also makes communicating between people from different backgrounds much harder. Yet it isn’t impossible.
Different doesn’t mean divided
Sadly, people can often take one look at the fact that languages chop up the world differently and assume that this means that communication between different languages or across different cultures is impossible. If their language doesn’t have a word for “řízek” or “stovies” then they obviously can’t understand them. If they don’t have different words for sheep in pies and sheep in the fields, then they obviously can’t tell the difference and I can’t offer them a nice mutton pie for dinner.
Of course, anyone can tell that is ridiculous. Chopping up the world differently still means that we can talk to each other. As we discovered last month, we just need some kind of linguistic and social common ground.
Yes, it takes more time to communicate with someone who chops up the world differently. But this provides opportunities, as well as obstacles.
When I was a child, I came across the fact that the Greek used in the New Testament of the Bible had several words for love. At that point, I could “love” chips, “love” my parents, and “love” my friends. It was all the same word, even if I knew there was a difference.
Yet, in New Testament Greek, there are agape, eros, philio, and storge. Those cover different types of love, from the type that leads to self-sacrifice (agape) to sensual love (eros). Making those distinctions can be very helpful. To make those distinctions in English, we might have to add an adjective or some kind of qualifying phrase.
Everyone can experience any of those types of love without having a word for it. We don’t need a word for it to understand the concept. It just might take more time to explain it. However, when we realise that Greek divides up our one concept of “love” that way, it gives us useful insights and can help us think in new ways. Rather than the words being a barrier, they become portals into new ways of thinking about the world.
So what?
The most obvious application of this principle is that we can’t expect ideas and words from our culture and language to transfer across easily to another language or culture. There are going to be things that need to be explained, qualified or even not said at all.
This is not license to get people to just take on our culture. It might sound simpler for everyone to just do things our way. But that approach isn’t just short-sighted; it’s selfish too. If interpreting is just a way of helping people understand us so they learn our ways, it is a tool of oppression. If multilingual church is a tool to make foreigners think and act like us, it’s anti-Gospel.
What if different ways of chopping up the world are a wonderful gift? It’s now well-known that organisations with multicultural leadership make decisions with greater insight than those where everyone is the same. We think better and create better with the benefit of more points of view.
How can we stay open to the gift of thinking in different ways?