The Fog of Translation

 All easy languages are alike; each difficult language is difficult in its own way.

(with apologies to Tolstoy)

In other words, all languages are difficult, each in its own way.

I speak two languages: English and Japanese (I should try to learn another language or two). While I make no claim to expertise about languages in general, I can compare Japanese to English. It is hard to imagine two languages that could be more different from each other. One difference that strikes the student of Japanese is how dependent the language is on context. Japanese is a high-context language; English is a low-context language. Speakers of Japanese can communicate effectively and clearly with other speakers of Japanese, all the while omitting subjects, objects, messing around with tenses, word order, and so on, as long as all parties to the discourse understand the context. Meanwhile, English tends to assume that everyone needs to be reminded of the context. Constantly.

For example, two young friends are talking about a musical show.

Japanese	Literal Translation	English
1st speaker: 明日、例のライブハウスだけど。行くの？	Tomorrow, that live house, go?	Are you going to that show tomorrow?
2nd speaker: そうだね。行くかも しれん。行くの？	Right. Might go. Go?	Right…I’m thinking of going. Are you going?
1st speaker: うん、行くと思う。	Hmm, thinking of going.	Yeah, I’m thinking of going.

 Both speakers understand the context and they know who is thinking of going where, but English usually demands that sentences have a subject, verb, and object, even when everything might be clear from the context. To native Japanese speakers, English can seem a little wordy and overdone. Can’t people figure out what they’re talking about without all those words? Another difference is that in a high-context language like Japanese, the way things are said, including verbal and bodily gestures, can strongly affect the way the actual words are understood. Of course, that is true of English as well, but the tendency is more pronounced in Japanese.

I am reasonably fluent in spoken Japanese, but I have struggled to understand what Japanese people are trying to say to me. The results of my efforts to understand have often been less than satisfactory, even comical.

Around the year 2000, I was working for NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, Japan’s public media network analogous to the BBC) as a field producer for their science program production division. My job was to work with NHK directors to coordinate research and location filming throughout North America. One series I worked on was called Space Millennium in English (宇宙への大紀行/Uchū e no daikikō, literally “Grand Tour of the Universe”). I worked directly for one of the directors, Ochiai-san. We spent months conducting research, meeting with scientists, visiting laboratories and observatories, and we spent more months with a small film crew at various locations. The work involved a great deal of travel, and we would often land at one airport, meet with a scientist or two the next day, and get on another plane that same day to repeat the process again. The work was interesting – and exhausting. Ochiai was a persistent man: he always did his homework in advance, and he had good questions. Lots of questions. (In fact, he was flattered to be told that his questions were better-informed than those from the Discovery Channel and even the exalted BBC itself.) My job was to coordinate with the various interview subjects, develop an itinerary, make all travel arrangements, drive us to each destination, interpret the interviews between Japanese and English, find someplace decent to get dinner, and so on.

Ochiai was a good man, extremely intelligent, and boundlessly curious. Like most NHK directors and producers, he was also very high-strung and stressed. It’s not easy to produce high-quality programs, and especially hard to do it using the reception fees (受信料/jushinryō) paid directly to NHK by the Japanese viewing public.  One NHK producer seemed to take pride in the short life expectancy of NHK people after mandatory retirement at age 60: “A year or two into retirement, they just drop dead after all those years of stress. It wears them out.”

We were checking in at the airport after a long day of interviews in the middle of an extensive trip around the US. We were at the airport counter when Ochiai told me to tell the agent to get him what to me sounded like アイレシート. Ai reshiito? “I-receipt”? What could that be. Well, there are Y-class tickets and other alphabetically identified airline mysteries: I thought there must be something called an “I-receipt,” and Ochiai seemed particularly eager to get it. The agent had no idea what I was talking about. I checked with Ochiai: It sounded for all the world like he wanted an “I-receipt.”

Now, I was very tired and frazzled, and anyway the Japanese language is filled with imports from English. You can say 領収書 (ryōshūsho) to mean “receipt,” or you can equally intelligibly say “reshiito.” Ochiai grew increasingly annoyed as we went round and round, with me trying to figure out what kind of receipt he wanted. He stamped his foot in vexation. And I was getting annoyed by his persisting in this weird demand for a species of receipt that no one had ever heard of.

At last, I figured out what Ochiai was after: he wanted an アイル・シート (airu shiito). I had misheard the third syllable; what he wanted was an “aisle seat.” Aha! Now I felt truly dense. But why couldn’t he just say that he wanted to sit on the 通路側 (tsūrogawa) – “on the aisle”? I would have understood that immediately. Again, Japanese is replete with so-called “loan words,” mostly from English (loan words that the Japanese seldom if ever return whence they came). As a globe-trotting NHK director, Ochiai knew the expression “aisle seat.” Like so many Japanese people, he took the Japanized version of the English expression and assumed I’d get it. I did not get it.

In the end, Ochiai got his airu shiito on that flight, and I learned, once again, to pay attention to the context. Because, in Japanese, context is everything.