the Art of Translation Lies Less in Knowing the Language Than in Knowing Your Own
"It'southward on the left," he says. "No, it's southeast of here," she says. iStockphoto hide caption
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"It's on the left," he says. "No, it'south southeast of hither," she says.
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Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas v-year-quondam Australian aboriginal girls always got it right.
She says the difference lies in language. Boroditsky, an acquaintance professor of cognitive scientific discipline at the University of California, San Diego, says the Australian aboriginal linguistic communication doesn't use words like left or correct. It uses compass points, and then they say things like "that girl to the east of you is my sister."
If y'all want to acquire some other linguistic communication and become fluent, you may have to change the way you lot behave in small but sometimes meaning ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice.
Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of applied linguistics at Temple University. She studies bilingualism and is the author of an upcoming book on this work.
If people speaking different languages demand to group or notice things differently, and so bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That'south exactly the instance, according to Pavlenko.
For case, she says English distinguishes betwixt cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material.
Based on her research, she started pedagogy future linguistic communication teachers how to aid their English-speaking students group things in Russian. If English-speaking students of Russian had to sort cups and glasses into different piles, then re-sort into chashka and stakan, they should sort them differently. She says linguistic communication teachers could practise activities similar this with their students instead of simply memorizing words.
"They feel mostly that this acknowledges something that they've long expected, long wanted to do but didn't know how," Pavlenko says. "They felt that it moved them frontwards, away from instruction pronunciation and doing the 'repeat afterwards me' activities."
Pavlenko points to research showing that if yous're hungry, you'll pay more than attention to food-related stimuli, and she says speaking another language fluently works the same way.
Ane'south native language could also impact retentiveness, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. She says Nabokov wrote 3 memoirs: He published one in English language, and when some other publishing business firm asked for ane in Russian, he accepted, thinking he would simply translate his first memoir.
"When Nabokov started translating information technology into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different volume," Pavlenko says. "It came out in Russian and he felt that in order to represent his childhood properly to his American readership, he had to produce a new version. So the version of Nabokov'southward autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to remember more things in Russian and and then re-translate them from Russian back into English."
Boroditsky besides studied the differences in what research subjects remembered when using English language, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This tin lead to differences in how people recall what they saw, potentially important in bystander testimony, she says.
John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't actually affair. The experiments "evidence that there are these tiny differentials that you can find that seem to correlate with what language you speak," McWhorter says. "Nothing has ever demonstrated that your language makes y'all process life in a different way. It just doesn't piece of work."
He calls this "the language hoax," which happens to be the title of his upcoming volume.
As an case, he refers to modern speakers of a Mayan linguistic communication, who likewise use directions that roughly correspond to compass points, rather than left or correct. Researchers asked people, most of whom only knew this language, to exercise tasks like memorizing how a ball moved through a maze, which would have been easier had they thought virtually it in terms of left and right, rather than compass points. The participants were only as good at these tasks and sometimes ameliorate, leading the experimenters to conclude they were not constrained past their language.
Boroditsky disagrees. She says the counterexamples simply prove language isn't the just cistron affecting what we observe. Like studying to be a pilot or medico, she says, learning to speak a different language fluently can also change us, and this ways we can acquire those changes, like learning any other skill.
"It'due south like a very all-encompassing grooming plan," Boroditsky says. "There's zero exotic about the furnishings that language has on noesis. It's just the aforementioned that any learning has on cognition."
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/30/258376009/how-language-seems-to-shape-ones-view-of-the-world
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