Lost in Translation?

‘Break a leg!’, the first time I heard my English colleague say this to me, that too just before an important presentation, I was shocked and even upset to say the least. It was only much later that I learnt it merely meant ‘Good Luck!’ Who knew, right? Well, welcome to the mysteries of the English language. Here began my tryst with the English-speaking world; it’s been quite an interesting journey.

Most of us think in the language we are most comfortable in, mostly our native tongue, and when we translate these thoughts verbatim into English all hell breaks loose. A word-to-word translation often ends up confusing the listener. This is where I learnt the basic difference between Indian tongues and the English language – their language structures were worlds apart! So, I started OBSERVING the simplest of sentences and how they were spoken. Our everyday lingo is bursting with examples like “Hi, do you have a minute?” as against “Hi, one minute you have?” which was incorrect. In some instances, sentences were followed by words like ‘Yes no?’ instead of ‘Right?’ – again a direct native tongue translation. I also noticed that sentences were unnecessarily complicated like, ‘I am having a doubt’ in place of ‘I have a doubt’ and the list goes on. I’m sure a lot of us can relate to these and might even be convinced it’s the right way of speaking the tongue.

In order to be able to speak English the right way I had to first break these patterns and re-learn the right way of speaking it.

With time I fixed these glitches and my language has already improved a great deal. Like I said, it’s been an interesting journey and I keep learning every day.