Oregon Humanities

Turning an Apple into an Orange

I’m a word nerd—always have been. I’ve been known to forward ‘word of the day’ emails with a touch too much glee. Come to think of it, I could be happy stuck on a deserted island as long as I had my Oxford English Dictionary. And maybe Spanish and French dictionaries if it was going to be a long stay. I love the musicality of words, the way they feel rolling off the tongue: listless, lascivious, lounge. I love onomatopoeic words: murmur, hiccup, zap. Or words that just make me giggle: aardvark, bamboozled, cacahuete.

But words aren’t just pleasing to the tongue and ear of course—every word we learn expands our capacity to experience the world and to explain our experiences to others and ourselves. I learned a new word recently through a grant Oregon Humanities awarded to Libraries of Eastern Oregon to do public programs around the concept of querencia, a Spanish word for home. But querencia means more than that; it means affection, longing, a homing instinct. Hemingway used it to describe the bull’s preferred place in the ring, the one to which he continually returns. My favorite definition explains querencia as a place about which a person can say, “_conoce como sus manos_,” he knows it like his hands. Learning this word has opened me up to new ways of thinking about home and belonging, but also reminded me that translation is in some ways the act of turning an apple into an orange.

One of our participating teacher’s at last month’s Oregon Humanities summer teacher institute is deaf, so we invited two American Sign Language interpreters to attend and interpret the weekend’s lectures and discussions. I was struck each day by the intensity and complexity of these interpreters’ work. They had to listen and translate ideas and language specific to multiple disciplines, including history, economics, environmental studies, politics, labor studies, and sociology. Lectures were dense, and conversations among faculty and teachers fast, furious, and full of idioms and metaphors. How could these interpreters possibly absorb and interpret so much new information and translate it into a series of physical gestures? And what words and expressions were they using that have no direct translation back into spoken English? I was fascinated.

On the second day of the institute, I was leading a discussion on representations of the workplace in pop culture, including TV, film, and advertising. I shared a series of clips related to how depictions of sex and romance in the workplace have changed over the last thirty years, and worried aloud that young viewers today might grow up thinking of the workplace as a sort of modern meat market, with colleagues constantly hitting on each other at the water cooler. As I said this, I caught some vigorous movement out of the corner of my eye and heard the room erupt in laughter. I turned to see one of the interpreters, Ryan, doing an energetic bump and grind. He didn’t bat an eye at our laughter—he just smiled and said with a wink, “What can I say? We all know what ‘hitting on’ means, and in ASL, we don’t tend to beat around the bush.”

After my talk was over, Ryan and I talked for a while about the challenges of translation and interpretation. He explained how American Sign Language shapes and is shaped by the deaf community and that, like any culture, deaf culture has conventions, shared values, and beliefs. You can imagine, he told me, how people who don’t hear could feel they are missing out on meanings as a result of the linguistic subtleties of spoken language. Why wouldn’t they create a language that minimizes that experience, that doesn’t prevaricate? Ryan also explained that that this linguistic preference extends to the deaf community’s culture as well—that deaf culture values directness, bluntness even, in language and character, so highly that the community as a whole shuns secret-keeping.

As much as this makes perfect sense, it was a revelation to me. The question of how language shapes us, shapes reality, is an old favorite for philosophers. But until I spent a weekend watching ASL interpreters, and having my own words interpreted by them, it never truly struck me how imperfect and ambiguous all language is. Whether we use a spoken or physically expressed language, whether we’re speaking our native tongue or fumbling our way through a new language, there are infinite ways to misunderstand each other, to interpret what is spoken. The tenuous thread between what we express, what we mean, and what others understand is beautifully, frustratingly imperfect. No word-of-the-day emails can change that fact, but to the extent that language has the power both to limit and liberate, I figure it can’t hurt.

About Jennifer Allen

Jennifer Allen is the director of programs for Oregon Humanities.

21 September 2010 | Posted by Jennifer Allen in Inside O. Hm.
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