My own career as a translator and interpreter is full of examples confirming that words alone are rarely enough to establish communication. From the Great Game to the West’s recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, cultural awareness has always been as important as linguistic skills. When translating, we inevitably intervene, add or cut, change the meaning or reframe the source, gloss local aspects or contextualise political demands, rephrase the author’s wording or introduce their work. They go back to the days of the Ottoman empire, when the job of the translator involved – just as it does today – much more than conveying ready messages. Stories of translators succeeding or failing thanks to their grasp of cultural issues, or lack thereof, are as old as multilingual communication itself. That is one of the central ideas explored in my recent book, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History. If language barriers make this challenge even greater, how do people the world over still manage to talk to each other? Translation, as any practitioner will attest, is as much about cultural mediation as it is about finding the right words and putting them in more or less the right order. Human communication, even in one language, always comes with the proviso that we understand and are understood much less than we hope.
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