Lost in translation

Jun 17, 2008

I have come to the conclusion that there really is a lot lost in translation.

I am spending my summer just outside Lima in Peru. It is my first time being to South America. The work itself is difficult. I am helping to direct a play and also assisting with English classes. The hardest thing about teaching I think is the necessity of being an authority figure. I cannot always be friendly with the kids and despite the fact that I feel as though I have no right to be treating them like children when I am only five years older than them at twenty. I now know how my mother feels when she took care of me and couldn´t let me get away with everything that I wanted to do.

But the first and ultimately biggest thing that stands in my way is the language barrier. Before I arrived here in Peru, I thought that my Spanish was great! I had been taking classes on and off for the last ten years of my life. I mean I got an A- in my class at the university without even trying. And then I arrived and I realized how different it really is to be in a country where they speak Spanish versus a classroom where Spanish is spoken for fifty minutes by a bunch of people all at the same level.

I was discussing this with some of the other volunteers both American and Spanish. I said that it was so much easier to understand the people in my classroom than here in Peru because I am thinking in the same way as that the people in my class are thinking...I am translating with them as they speak. So even when an American says something incorrectly in Spanish, I understand what they wanted to say because I could have potentially made the same mistakes myself. Whereas, Peruvians speak and say things correctly and yet, I sometimes can´t understand a thing.

The language barrier makes me feel like people are judging me as stupid or at least less than intelligent. I cannot say the things that I want to say and unlike my experience in France last summer, there are not many people who speak English that can come to my rescue.

I think that being in a country where you cannot communicate what you want gives a person a whole new respect for immigrants in the United States. I will never look at another person in the USA who cannot speak English in the same way. I remember sometimes being a little frustrated with foreign people yet now I understand how hard every day is for them to go out into the world.

This wasn´t the most eloquent way of saying this but I thought I would share. Each day gets easier here. I wish I was staying for longer than two months so that I could improve my Spanish even more.