le stagiaire

It's hard to say if any intern really knows their place when thrust into the real world.  Sometimes I feel like a secretary.  Sometimes like a burden.  Others like the missing puzzle piece needed to complete a project.  You know, intern life.

At my stage I have fallen into the role of translator and editor.  Anything english, send it my way.

Originally I balked at the idea.  I didn't want to be a machine, converting other peoples' ideas.  I want to be the person creating ideas.  But I'm an intern.  It definitely beats photocopying.

What I didn't realize about translation is it isn't always possible.  Some ideas will never be transmitted from one language to another.  At least not in the unique, beautiful, nuanced way it is communicated in the original language.   Language is a cultural artifact.  Not just a means by which to transmit ideas, but an idea worth exploring in itself.  Many english words you can say with a french accent and voilà, c'est français! But it's not.  It is and it isn't the same.  Each word is colored by history, by the culture in which it is spoken.  While there might be an equivalent "translation," there isn't really.  The structure of a sentence often determines the most important part.  Yes, what is most important to the sentence, but also what is most important to the speaker (and in effect the native listener).  But the same structure is often impossible when it comes to the important things.  Even as a second language speaker, translating into my langue maternale, I will understand the original text but be at a complete loss for the subsequent translation.  It is impossible to recreate the exact same sense, the nuance and rhythm and heartbeat of a text that fait vivre the ideas of the human behind it.  Where the ideas are the soul the text is the flesh.

Maybe I take too much agency from the speaker.  You can have ideas without a text, without the tool, but no one will ever know them.  In turn we learn to shape our ideas through these tools, and learn to how to use these tools to express our ideas.  But where one language expresses certain ideas beautifully, it falls quite short with others.  Language shapes humor and severity.  It shapes love and heartbreak.  Some delicately perform descriptions while others march through time with combinations of verbs impossible d'ailleurs.  Sometimes the causitive requires auxilary.  Sometimes it's a conjugation or a pronoun placement or preposition or sometimes it doesn't exist.  Transitive v. intransitive v. ditransitive.  Yes there is another way to evoke the intention, but it is never the same.  Consumers responsabilisent davantage translators much more than they know.

Exact translation is impossible.  That's why I began learning other languages.  Because I wanted to understand exactly what people in the world were saying.  I didn't want to rely on a filter, especially now that I know just how much is left out, just how much I am missing by not speaking the language.

Die Residenz, in the heart of Munich, was home to the Bavarian royal family.  In itself German has dialects which are often mutually unintelligible.  Wandering the many halls dedicated to visiting heads of state, I wonder just how much went wrong in the world simply from miscommunication.