Despite what some people think and claim, it’s not just a matter of reading in one language and writing in another: especially when dealing with legal or technical documents, even a short text can require a substantial amount of research. Of course, over time it becomes easier, as one learns where to look for reliable information, and simply stockpiles commonly used turns of phrases to look up in a pinch.

I have worked on projects big enough, sometimes for huge companies whose products you most likely use or have used—I cannot be any more specific due to non-disclosure agreements I have signed—to realize, first-hand, that translation is way more than that. Each individual project, no matter how big or small, has its own peculiarities. Translating a mobile app for children requires a different approach compared to the technical manual of a safety valve testing rig, for instance, and a certificate of pending charges has very little in common with the product descriptions of an online shop specialized in DJ equipment.

While mistakes can happen, translation is one field in which striving for perfectionism is a very basic requirement. It is true that once the project is delivered, never hearing again from the client is a good sign (it means everything went fine and no revision is required!), but sloppiness is never a good way to start. This is especially true for certified translations, a field I recently started working on.

Knowing that a translation is going to be certified by the agency means that, as a translator, I represent the agency; and the agency is solemnly claiming, to the full extent of the Law, that the translation faithfully matches the original text. Nothing is allowed to go wrong. And this opens up a whole new can of worms for each project: should I use the American date format, with the month before the day, or the European date format, with the day before the month? Should I use the British or the American spelling, if I’m translating into English? What is the best way to rephrase this without drifting too much from the original, while at the same time being fully clear for the reader? And what if something simply does not exist in the countries where the destination language is spoken?

It can be daunting. And it’s a good idea never to feel too confident, for overconfidence is the root cause of catastrophe (“look ma, no hands! look ma, no teeth!”). I was lucky to have wonderful supervisors and coordinators for all the agencies I work with: they guided me as I took my first few steps and encouraged me, putting up with my incredible level of early paranoia. Sometimes I still worry when I pick up a job: the customer may not be clear in her requests, or something may be unreadable if it’s a scan, or I may just have no idea how to translate a specific passage until I research it in detail.

But I always made it work, and it’s very rewarding on many levels. Sometimes I stop and think about what I do, and what it means to me—why I love it so much. Translation is the ultimate tool for communication. When you speak one language, your message has a limited pool of potential recipients: those who understand that language. By translating it into other languages, the pool grows considerably, and your message gets one step closer to being universally understood.

As a translator, I am enabling people to achieve that goal, whatever their message may be. It’s often commercial in nature: press releases, apps, websites. Sometimes, however, it’s not: I have translated texts for charities, for projects that involved or were targeted at kids. I distinctly remember one Sunday morning, when I almost accidentally picked up one such job; I couldn’t stop myself, and left a comment to the customer simply thanking them for what they were doing, and for allowing me to be a small part of it.

And then of course, there’s the other kind of material: the certified documents that end up on the desks of notaries, lawyers, ambassadors. Each one of these, no matter how small or short, make me feel honored, and that’s for a simple reason: because they all tell a story. Sometimes the customer shares a few basic details: “I need this to apply for citizenship”, or “this is for my son’s passport”. Other times I can infer it: a university transcript is the prime sign that the student is packing to work abroad, for instance.

Yet many times, there’s not enough context to tell what it is for, and my imagination runs wild. I wonder why this person with a French last name is requiring his father’s birth certificate to be translated, or what the property mentioned as being for sale looks like, or whether there is any update on the prognosis described in this medical report. I wonder, and imagine, and dream. Like when I was thrown all the way to a hundred and thirty years ago, trying to read the gorgeous but amazingly cryptic cursive of a birth certificate from the 1890s. That was barely thirty years after Italy was united into a single country. That was before the first modern plane flew. That was before the world knew what the Great War was. That was when school was something for the rich, and the common folk couldn’t even sign a certificate because they simply couldn’t read or write. I have no idea why this stuff needed to be translated, or what the customer’s ultimate goal was; I cannot come up with any reason beyond genealogy research.

But at the end of the day, as curious as I am, I do not even want to know. I’m content with knowing that someone’s communication need was fulfilled, and I was the one who enabled them to do so. That’s why I do this.

In today’s highly globalized world, languages get mixed and evolve at a much faster pace than ever before. English, for instance, is no longer only divided into British, American, Canadian and Australian English; we could say that there is a variety or dialect of English for any other natural language: Spanglish, Chinglish and so on. When French was the de-facto lingua franca of diplomacy (and, by extension, Western Europe), it was not substantially modified by other local languages; yet when English replaced it, after World War I and especially after World War II, it started changing immediately.

English, in particular its American variety, was not only originally used for international diplomacy; rather, as the United States rose a superpower in many fields (technology, business, etc.), one could argue that its language became widespread from the bottom. The average Joe in most other Western countries was exposed to American words: they wore blue jeans, they put coins into juke-boxes, they went to a bar. English words became commonplace over time, and this ultimately led to the creation of what could be easily considered a series of creoles that are, for the most part, mutually intelligible.

(A simple example: Italian immigrants in the US who returned to Italy brought the word sciuscià back with them. It is now seldom used anymore, but it was a common term in Southern Italy after WW2. As many may have guessed, it was the Italianized version of the English word shoe-shiner, whose direct Italian translation would actually be lustrascarpe.)

This “linguistic pollution,” while being very interesting on its own, makes it extremely difficult to analyze the nature of the relationship between language and thought. Language isolates, however, come to the rescue.

A language isolate is a language which shows no direct “genetic” correlation with any other language. The most widely known isolate is probably Basque (Euskera), spoken in an area between Spain and France. This is what the article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“All human beings are born free…”) looks like in Basque:

Gizon-emakume guztiak aske jaiotzen dira, duintasun eta eskubide berberak dituztela; eta ezaguera eta kontzientzia dutenez gero, elkarren artean senide legez jokatu beharra dute.

While this is unintelligible to most (if not all) non-speakers, we can immediately notice that at least one word is recognizable: kontzientzia. This proves that Basque has been somewhat polluted by surrounding Romance languages, and renders it useless for the research in question.

Thankfully, there are some language isolates that are spoken in areas that are also geographically isolate. The most striking example is the Pirahã language, spoken by less than 400 people along the Maici River, in Brazil. It is among the most amazing languages that we know about.

Widely studied by Professor Daniel Everett, Pirahã shows very peculiar characteristics, the most striking of which are the following:

• A single word meaning both “mother” and “father”
• No numerals, except for words that roughly mean “small quantity” and “large quantity”
• No terms for colors, except for words that roughly mean “dark” and “bright”
• Only three pronouns (I, you, they) that need to be combined to yield the others (I + you = we)
• A very limited clause system that effectively prevents embedding sub-clauses

The lack of specific numerals has been actually tested by Everett in an experiment. The question is: do Pirahã speakers “understand” numbers even without having words for them? They certainly understand the concept of quantities. It has been written — I’m afraid I can’t locate the source right now, so please take this with a grain of salt — that any attempts to teach them actual numeral words failed, because while they understood the underlying concept, they were simply unable to use them, as they were not used to them. In a way, it is not unlike most people’s reaction to Esperanto’s future participle: we sort of get the grammatical idea, but we just don’t know what to do with it.

When I was in Egham, UK, for a summer English course, one of the teachers we had told us one thing that stuck with me: language is a habit. You can say you speak another language, he argued, only when you stop thinking in your native language and translate your thoughts; you can say you have mastered a language only when you think and speak directly in that language. The implications of this simple gem are enormous: in order to be proficient in a language, we have to absorb not just its rules, but its way of thought. If we were to learn Pirahã, then, we would have to rewire our brain in order to get rid of the distinct concepts of numerals, colors and so on that we have been using all our life. If we didn’t, we would just be translating all the time. This is clearly no easy task, but proves that language is indeed a habit.

Another very interesting language, albeit not strictly a language isolate, is the Aymara language, spoken by little more than two million people among Chile, Perú and Bolivia. While most other languages refer to the future as being “in front of us” and the past as being “behind us,” speakers of Aymara refer to the future as being “behind them,” and the past as being “in front of them.” It sounds out of place to us, but only until we put our prejudice aside and stop to think about it.

While we say that “times goes fast,” we still imply that we are the ones moving through time; we simply cannot, quite literally, take a break from it. We are forced to go through time, and we conceive this as physically moving through it. For this reason, we can claim that the future is ahead of us because we are going there, and that the future is behind us because we have already been there; in fact, we are coming from the past and going towards the future. It makes sense.

The Aymara people, however, use a different paradigm. They stand still, and time travels “through” them. They are facing the past because they know what has already happened, simply because, well, it has already happened. On the other hand, nobody knows what the future yields, therefore it is as if it were behind our back. We can only see in front of us, and we can only fully see the past. It makes sense as well, but if you find yourself having a hard time fully accepting this point of view, worry not: it’s quite common. At least you can understand how the Pirahã feel about dealing with concepts they never felt a need for.

Language indeed defines culture, and this is also why Esperanto can be difficult to handle at times: not having a pool of natural speakers, save for the relatively few “native” children of Esperanto-speaking couples, and therefore not having a unique backing culture, at times it simply feels too arbitrary. Moreover, most Esperantists have a strong aversion to the naturalization of foreign words, preferring etymological translations in order to preserve the language’s origins; failure to do so is referred to as krokodili. As an example, e-mail is called e-mail in most languages (even in French, which is notoriously picky about foreign words: they use logiciels on their ordinateurs rather than software on their computers!) Yet, the correct word for e-mail in Esperanto is not *emajlo or something similar, but rather retpoŝto: ret[a] (network), poŝto (mail.) How this helps new Esperanto speakers, especially in today’s world, is beyond me, but I suppose that this is a topic for another post.

A final note: many of you may have heard that the “Eskimo language” has an incredible number of words for snow. The idea behind this is that, since they are surrounded by snow, they talk about it a lot. While it’s a fascinating claim, it’s also completely false. Moreover, there is no such thing as an “Eskimo language” (just like there is no “Indian language” or “Chinese language”), and the word “Eskimo” is actually considered derogatory. However, this urban legend is yet another proof that language defines culture, or at least feeds prejudices — in this case quite innocent ones, thankfully — about different cultures.