For many people that speak more than one language, one of our biggest challenges is direct translation from one language to the other. Usually, my brain processes a conversation is one language – usually, English – but depending on the language I want to translate to, I usually have to consciously scout for words that fulfil exactly what I want it to mean in the language I processed the thought with.
Most languages are inadequate; English is perhaps worse. The diverse origin of English from the Anglo-Saxon and the numerous foreign influences may account for the inadequacy of the language. A lot of the borrowed words are used in more contexts than in their original language. This creates a huge problem for foreign learners, bilinguals and multilinguals. At times, they find words that mean something in another language but there’s no exact word that can mean that same word (especially in that same context) in English. You’re more likely to find close meanings but nothing that fully meets the meaning you want.
For me, it’s when translating from Arabic to English. There are numerous words that have unique meanings, especially in various contexts but when translated to English, there’s no equivalent. It’s so evident that more often than not, when a word was already translated from Arabic to English, but now needs to be translated back to English, you choose a different word in Arabic from its original meaning. For example, “jayyid”, “hasan” and “khair” in Arabic mean different things and have different contexts that they’re appropriate in. But a translation to English can only mean “good”. However, in Arabic, “good” is not the best way to describe them. So, if we want to translate “good” back to Arabic, more often than not, you’ll use “jayyid” which seems to be the more tolerable for its context. If the text was originally “khair” or “hasan”, it’s safe to conclude that it has lost its meaning.
This discourse becomes more crucial when literary texts are being discussed. Because of the inadequacy in English, many authors are not comfortable with their works being directly translated to English because of the fear of it losing its meaning. And for works whose meanings are very important to them, it’s safer to keep it untainted in the original language. Even when some works are translated, many of them now retain words from the original language before the host language’s inability to succinctly describe its meaning. We see this often in African literature where works that have been translated – and some that are even in their original languages – use words that are untranslated. This is popular in works of Ngugi wa Thiong’O and Okot p’Bitek. Also in Chinua Achebe’s works, we see the use of words like “Chi”, “efulefu”, “ogbanje” and many more. The inadequacy of the English language must have contributed to why they were not translated to English. Readers should however research to fully understand them in context.
This is also the biggest argument for the preservation of the Qur’an, the Islamic religious book. Hence, people are encouraged to understand the original language to fully grasp the scope of its meanings. Language inadequacy has been an age-long problem. But with the growth of language and more fluidity in meanings, these inadequacies will be filled bit by bit.
