Language Barrier

Debaters are valued for a multitude of reasons. Normally, only people who can think on their feet will become debaters, and they also must be fluent in the language of their choosing. Wittiness and a sense of humour are also valued attributes in debaters.

As a research team member on the USJ 12 debate team when I was in Form 4, I was once given this topic just to assess my ability as a debater: Language is a barrier to acquiring knowledge. Of course, my eyeballs dropped out as I had no idea on how to start or what it actually meant.

To me, language is necessary for acquiring any type of knowledge. Sure, basic skills such as carpentry, masonry and many household chores can be picked up without language, but language would facilitate the teaching and learning of these skills. On top of that, science, mathematics, social sciences and history all require language for the knowledge to be stored, and also to be taught.

Languages form a big part in our daily lives. We use it to exchange information, give opinions and also to give out orders. We might not enjoy languages, especially when our ability to use a language we don’t really enjoy using is examined, but we still need to use languages nonetheless.

Coming back to the original topic posed to me, I now see that there is more than one dimension to acquiring knowledge. If everyone on the planet used one language, then this would language would in no way be a problem to acquiring knowledge. However, there are probably thousands of languages in use now all over the world, some by a few dozen people, others by over a billion people. The problem is not acquiring knowledge from people who speak the same language as you do; it is in fact, acquiring knowledge from people who don’t speak your language.

When we translate, a lot of what we say is lost in translation. Sometimes, literal translations cause phrases to lose their original meaning, other times, translations which take into account what the speaker is saying cause some of the “oomph” of the original work to be lost. Even good translations lose their effect on people through different ways; different cultures consider different aspects of life differently, and even the order in which a list is made differs.

While translations don’t really wreck havoc in science and mathematics (the proof is generally all there, and by convention, language used must be to the point, concise and unambiguous), they can cause much trouble in social sciences, and absolutely wreck havoc in the fine arts, where the underlying meaning has normally much more weight than the words themselves.

Different languages may also form barriers when it comes to socializing, and acquiring information not directly necessary to one’s career, but necessary for one’s social life. The inability to understand your social contacts can prove pretty damaging when it comes to developing relations with them, especially when they start using what some would call advanced language.

However, two people don’t need to use two languages to cause misunderstanding. Sometimes, two people using the same language can have communication breakdowns. This is especially true with Chinese, with its many dialects. Mandarin (commonly called Chinese by Chinese-eds, so for the record, the dialect is Mandarin), Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew…the list goes on and on…

The bottom line is, while in writing they will be able to understand each other perfectly, when they speak, misunderstanding, and laughter ensues. Of course, there has been debate whether all the languages should be collectively called the Chinese language, with different dialects, or whether they should be called different languages altogether, due to the differences in pronunciation between the various dialects. The debate goes on.

But even in languages where there is much standardization, communication breakdowns can still occur. Take English, for example, where the spelling of nearly every word is the same (we have the Americans to thank for that) and the pronunciation is supposedly the same. On one occasion, I was told to go to the “hall on the third floor” of a building. Having been there before, I went three floors up as I knew that there was a hall there.

Little did I realize that I only had to go up two floors. They had actually meant the second floor above ground level, also known as the second floor, in British English, or the third floor, in American English. So much for using the same language to avoid confusion. This goes to show that even when using the same language, the usage of a same word in a given situation can convey a number of different meanings.

Another more common, though less thought of language barrier is that between generations. Words such as “lame” or “cool” enter differently in the dictionary of people of different generations. On the one hand, most youth would understand the meaning of those two words almost instantly, while most of their parents would only know “cool” as a degree of warmth, and “lame” as a disability affecting one’s ability to move, especially with one’s legs.

How do you explain to your parents what’s cool? Not what is cool and what isn’t, but what cool is. Would someone who did not grow up in an environment such as that understand it? I’m not saying that all parents are thick and do not want to understand their kids, it’s just that the differences of language used, or rather, the differences of usage in the language they use, can present problems unique to each batch of children.

Language will continue to be a barrier when we communicate. It is a human construct, and as such cannot possibly be perfect. We will continue to have communication breakdowns, regardless of whether the breakdown is in a casual, unimportant situation, or formal, important situation. What we can do, however, is to learn each other’s language and adapt accordingly; learn to listen how they would listen, and learn to speak how they would speak. It doesn’t matter whether the language is different, or the dialect is, or the usage of the language is; when the message doesn’t get across, there is almost always a language barrier.