Translation is NOT?a single activity

Translation is NOT?a single activity.

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It is a group of activities, across hundreds of language pairs.

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Imaginably, different languages feature distinct strengths and perspectives. An alphabetic language enjoys a nearly unlimited ability to coin new words. The more words, the more specific the language is when it comes to describing the world. Consequently, an alphabetic language tends to be more precise and enables its speakers to be more specificity-oriented.

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A logographic language like Chinese, on the other hand, is restricted in its character-creating potential, therefore has a limited number of characters, and affords its speakers a different pair of linguistic lens to view the world, through which one tends to ignore the specificity and instead identify the commonality.

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For example, where English speakers easily draw a distinction between what sound like two different concepts: desk and table, speakers of Mandarin Chinese are encouraged to perceive the commonality between desk and table, helped by a common word being used (“reading table / dining desk”?or “reading desk / dining table”?look and sound exactly the same in Chinese).

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On the other end of the linguistic spectrum, Mandarin, Cantonese and a whole bunch of the Chinese varieties are closely related. They adopt more or less the same writing system, share a large number of words, are subject to almost the exactly same grammatical rules, and sound more or less similar. For example, a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker would be able to read the same page and be literally “on the same page”. The lexical affinities, among others, do help to make translation feel like a breeze.

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Based on the foregoing gibberish, it may be reasonable to conclude that translation across different language pairs is not a single activity.

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When it comes to translation, being language-neutral?means overlooking the language-specific differences and expecting to use the same rules in guiding a whole group of vastly different activities.

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People realize sport is not a single activity and won’t expect an Olympic swimmer to be a football coach. People fail to realize the same, when it comes to translation.

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Being language-neutral risks over-generalization. Over-generalization risks oversimplification.

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Translation is not a single activity.