How many languages do you speak?
Our coaching, counseling and therapy conversations are in different languages. Dutch, Frisian, Russian and English. We also speak a word of Polish, French and some German.
But there is something about those languages…. We use the same words, but sometimes they mean something totally different. Think of it as a culture clash where the same word means something entirely different in another country, even though we use the same words.
To give you an idea, when we look at English, the meaning of the same word in another country can have an entirely different meaning, even though they both speak English.
Examples:
Wagon
US – A wooden vehicle drawn by horses.
Ireland – Obnoxious woman
Pissed
US – Angry
UK – Drunk
Grand
US – Stately or impressive
Ireland – ‘Great’ simply means ‘fine’.
And that’s just the literal meaning, let alone the intensity the ‘sender’ uses that word for in his/her own culture. How drunk does one have to be to be “pissed” in the UK to be more than just “drunk”? If you’re not from the same (U.K) culture, it’s hard to almost impossible to understand if you’re from the US. Let alone if English is not your first language to begin with.
To make it even easier… for us Dutch is our first language in which we think and talk (for E it is Frisian), but for our clients it is often not their first language either… So what do they say and what do we receive?
And while writing this article, I can choose to “translate” this document into 19 English languages. (UK, US, South Africa, Belise, Ireland, etc.) Which language will I choose when translating this article from Dutch to English, and are we still saying the same thing?
In our work, it is therefore essential to pay close attention. What do I mean to say, and what does the other person receive? Is that correct and if that is not correct, I have to make adjustments immediately(!) before we have a confusion of languages that you cannot resolve. Oh, and after the language challenges…. we have the culture challenges … and they are way bigger than just the language…. yep.
And so it is with Bible verses. It is Critical there to look at what translation is being used, how it was translated, and why the translator used the words he/she used in their language. What was the context?
A normal day in our lives on this side…. Correct, with the necessary obstacles, no matter how well you speak the “language” to begin with.
