Best of week: Words That Just Don't Translate

In the midst of one of our many Kite Runner discussions this week, an interesting issue came up. On page 38, towards the middle of Chapter 5, we are given details on the walking terror of Amir's childhood, Assef. Amir recalls he later "learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath."

To analyze the quote on its basic level is pretty simple: Amir is assuming that Assef is a sociopath because of his terrible deeds and apparent lack of any feelings or empathy. Of course, later in the book, Assef's actions get even worse and culminate (maybe) in the horrible alley scene with Hassan.

To use micro vs. macro here, we can assume that Hosseini is writing this on the micro level. Amir is just making a possible statement about Assef's mental condition. But, as we look on the macro level, Hosseini is doing something pretty interesting: he's showing that words don't necessarily translate well.

Let's take a step back from the details of the story for a second and see what might be going on. We know that this is in 1970s- 1980s Afghanistan, so obviously education wasn't at its prime. It's probably one of the harshest regions in the world, and it's not likely that they had the time or necessarily the wanting to develop words for social disorders.

So, what I'm really saying is that words in a given language can tell you so much about the place that they come from. A little research on Farsi shows that it originated in Iran and spread all around the area, into places like Afghanistan and Bahrain. Now, given the fact that there's no Farsi word for "sociopath," we can make a pretty important assumption: they didn't ever take the time to research or develop facts on disorders.

This could all be a stretch, and I might be completely wrong, but if you think about the way languages work, there's some big evidence. We only develop words that we're really going to use, ones that we need. It usually takes time for a word to catch on and circulate. When words are missing, there usually either isn't a huge need for them, or nobody knows that there's a need for them.

The core of the statement I'm making is that Khaled does a great job of showing us something about the way Afghanistan works. It only took him one passage to make the point that Afghanistan was lacking something, empathy for those with disorders or the complete lack of knowledge on mental conditions. This is so powerful because we know a lot more now about the world our characters live in.

Of course, there'd be no point in making this macro statement if it didn't apply elsewhere. The reason there are so many languages in the world is that every distinct region has its own, every area or country shapes its own words. Take for example the word google. Recently, it was accepted as a real word, one that means "to search the internet using the Google search engine." Now, if you went to a third-world country and find me a lingual equivalent for this word of ours, I would be completely surprised. They won't have a word for it because they don't know about it, they don't need a word.

Lastly, we have one more interesting observation to think about. Given that our languages are all different, we can be certain that not all translating will be smooth; some words won't translate at all. So, we need to think more outside of our language and the barriers that we set on it, and look at other languages. Words can tell you history, they can teach you everything about people and places. Therefore, locking ourselves up in the English language is like ignoring history everywhere else. This is why we study foreign languages, and why Hosseini's point is so brilliant.