#multilingualism

so i say oh i gotta show you this one version- and i pull up Þór Breiðfjörð's INCREDIBLE performance from the 2012 Reykjavik production of Les Mis. i didn't tell them what it was, i wanted them to experience it fresh.

as soon as it became clear that it was in a different language, my mom starts- i kid you not- LAUGHING. then she asks me "what is this"? like what do you mean? it's Bring Him Home from Les Mis, it just happens to be in Icelandic! but my mom immediately loses interest, and i turn it off.

Imagine you are in person at a conference or a meeting or a speech. Doesn’t matter what kind. On the podium is the spokesperson along with another person, a translator. maybe the spokesperson speaks language ‘x’ and has to be translated into language ‘y’ or vice versa. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you know both language x and y. Fluently. Closely even to the point of a native speaker. Well, the speech starts and that’s where it begins:

The spokesperson says a sentence. Let’s say it’s in the foreign language. Okay, you understand it and process it and your brain automatically translates it.

Then the TRANSLATOR says the sentence. But it’s in your mother tongue so your brain shifts gears a bit. And…hold on.. that isn’t how you would say that.. a better phrasing would be—hooly shit they’ve moved on okay lock in what are they talking about—

And then the spokesperson speaks again and it’s the other language again so your brain shifts gears again and your brain translates it on its own and then the translator says the same damn thing again but you wouldn’t phrase it like thaaaa— and you’ve lost half of the next sentence from the spokesperson and holy shit your head begins to hurt—

And look. This may be…Bearable let’s say… if the speech is like 10-15 min long, but 30 min? 2 hours? What if you Have to be there at that conference the whole day huh??

So in short:

Stuff like that is hell.

Your head WILL hurt. A lot.

You have mental, one sided beef with the translator.

You wish you could die.

my uni has no access to it, but i feel it’s gonna be very relevant to my thesis, so if you don’t mind… can you download the pdf for me 🙏