Here Comes The Sun?
Our studies of Bantu languages has given us just a small idea of the challenges involved in communicating thoughts in one language into another: idiom, metaphor, cultural differences. A good translator or interpreter has to take account of all these factors and many more when she or he embarks on their task. And we have merely scratched the surface. Another metaphor, you see?
Let’s go back to the Bantu languages to consider another potential headache – metaphor again – for translators. Without usually being aware of it, we all have in our mind a mental picture of the way the world works. We imagine, wrongly, that everybody must surely see the world in the same way. Once we begin to study any language – even one closely related to our own – we quickly realise that this is far from being the case. And when we explore lan-guages belonging to other families, this conviction is reinforced even more powerfully.
Take the word ‘sun‘ for example. Its meaning is clear: the medium-size star around which the planets of our solar system orbit. But meaning and connotation are two different things. Every word has a meaning, but also a set of associations that go far beyond the dictionary definition. What comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘sun’? What are its connotations? Happiness, warmth, brightness? Here Comes the Sun, Summer Breeze, You are the Sunshine of My Life.
Every language has a word for ‘sun’, of course. The meaning is the same: the medium-size star around which the planets of our solar system orbit. But the connotations, the mental images conjured up, are not. In the Kongo language the word is ntangu, a word that also means ‘time’. In this part of the world, the sun is not a friend, a dream of warmth of light, the longed-for thaw after a long, cold, lonely winter. The sun is so hot that people always seek the shade. The sun is ntangu, a marker of time.
Translation is an art form. An interesting consideration of the pitfalls of register, idiom, metaphor, connotation and near-synonyms, seen through an unusual prism in The Language Secret:
