Translating a Simple Conversation

It’s amazing how different girls and guys are.  Let’s take the following scenario.

Guy and girl are together at an event at point A. Guy needs to get to point B and girl needs to get to point C.  Getting from A to B and from A to C require going on the same overlapping route for at least half the trip.  There are public transport portals, called BART stations, at various points along the overlapping routes and at point C.

What girl says to guy: “Hey, could you drop me at a BART station that’s convenient for you?”

What girl means: “Hey could you drop me at a BART station that’s convenient for me?  I’m open to a compromise where you drop me at one that’s sort-of convenient and sort-of-not-convenient for both of us, but I know you won’t drop me at the one that’s most inconvenient to me and furthest from where I’m going even if it is the most convenient to you because that would just be mean and rude.  I’ve already shown you that I appreciate you and value your time by suggesting that you pick one convenient to you, so you should show me that you appreciate me and value my time by taking me to a BART station that isn’t inconvenient to me.

What guy hears: “Hey… BART station… convenient…”

Then guy drops girl off at the BART station closest  to point A, to where they both just were, most convenient for him, least convenient for her.

What girl thinks as he drops her off: “I can’t believe he’s dropping me off here!  I’m going to have to switch trains; it’s going to take me forever to get to point C.”

What guy thinks as he drops her off: “This is a convenient BART station.  I am a good person because I went out of my way to do exactly what she asked me to do and saved her the walk here.”

What girl thinks on her BART ride home: “It’s the end of the world!  He doesn’t like me.  If he liked me, he’d want to spend time with me and talk to me, and if he wanted to spend time with me and talk to me he would have kept me in the car longer, but he got rid of me as soon as possible so clearly he doesn’t want to talk to me or spend time with me so he clearly doesn’t like me.

He doesn’t care about what happens to me.  He dropped me off by myself at nighttime in the city, far from home.  If he cared about me, he wouldn’t want me roaming around the city by myself after dark, he would want me next to him to be sure I was protected and safe.  But he just dropped me off to let who knows what happen to me, clearly he doesn’t care about me.

He doesn’t respect me or my time, he thinks the things I do aren’t important.  He knows it’ll take me an hour to get home from this location and he could have saved me at least 20 minutes by dropping me at a different BART station. That might have cost him an extra 5 minutes but if he doesn’t think 5 minutes of his time is worth 20 minutes of my time then he clearly doesn’t value my time, and if he doesn’t value my time then he doesn’t value what I do and he thinks the things he does with his time are more important than the things I do with my time.  He’s so self-centered!"

He doesn’t respect me!   He hates me!  It’s the end of the world!

What guy is thinks on his drive home:

 

 

Sometimes, it’s tough being a girl, with all this thinking and "logic and expectations of considerate-ness….  Yeah, being a girl can be a pain, but for the cute shoes, it’s totally worth it.

I Say "Tomato" You Say... "Pumpkin"?

If British English is the Bentley of the English language, American is the Mustang Coupe, and Nigerian is the Pinto.

I am amazed that there are young people here who cannot speak the language of their tribes, what they call "their language."  They are left only with this strange, broken-down English.  The other day, I sat in a room with several people and couldn't understand anything.  The only reason I knew they were speaking English was that one of the girls involved in the conversation doesn't speak any other languages.

Sometimes I want to correct people when speaking or when I see something written.  But I don't.  On the one hand, it may not be wrong, just different.  It would be like telling a Brit to say "sweater" instead of "jumper" or "french fries" instead of "chips."  (I am sure Katrina could give plenty of Australian examples as well.)  And British terminology like this accounts for some of the trouble I have with Nigerian English.

Biscuit, not cookie

Trousers, not pants

Sweets, not candy

Mad, not crazy

On the other hand, words are used wrongly or have assumed entirely new meanings.  Grammar rules are paid as much mind as a midget ref at an NBA game.  Half the time nobody sees, and the other half they don't care.  A few examples:

• Grapefruit is called grape, differentiated by grapes only by the s.
• The part of a dress or shirt that covers the shoulder and arm is called a "hand".  I should ask someone what a "sleeve" is.
• From the church bulletin, "The soul of man is the centre of its activity, so your activities will become limited, your spread will be restricted except you satisfy your soul with certify, qualitative, adequate, sufficient knowledge."
• An advertisement for Odade Publishers, the Nigerian LexisNexis partner, found in the program for the NBA conference discusses what you can do with their product in the following way: With LexisNexis Analytics, you would access distilled information from the "invisible web".  You would monitor media in 9 different languages.  You would quickly spot patterns, draw conclusions and gain strategic advantage over competitors and opponents.  My favorite part is actually in the next point about why you should get Odade LexisNexis,  After saying a brief bit about the training sessions the company has done, the advertisement says, "We would do more!"  You would, would you?  But what?  Why don't you?

I came across an article about a year ago that actually discussed this issue.  Nigerian English is so different from Standard English (however you define that) that it is hurting Nigeria economically.  Nigerians encounter problems trying to do business outside their country, or trying to attract developers to Nigeria, because their English not only makes communication difficult, it makes them sound less smart than they really are.

Because it's not just terminology, but the grammatical structures that are different from other forms of English, the Nigerian version isn't looked at as much as another dialect as it is as wrong.  Australian, British and American English are all different.  A speaker of one might have a bit of difficulty understanding the speaker of another due to some different terminology, but the grammatical structures of the sentences will still be the same.  It might be like an elderly person trying to talk to someone using new slang.  But the way some people talk in Nigeria, it's more like a high-class, very cultured old woman trying to talk to someone speaking Ebonics (which has it's own grammar rules).

Of course, there is also pidgin English spoken around here, which they just call Pidgin.  This doesn't bother me as much.  Perhaps because people don't usually think they are speaking proper English, and because it's very interesting to see elements of native languages in various pidgins.  It's harder for me to understand the pidgin here than it was in Zambia, because I don't know anything about the local languages. 

In Zambia, I understood the Bantu grammatical structure, so I could not only figure out what people meant, but usually figure out why they said what they said.  Once, when I was carrying Nchimunya across the compound, Ba Lenix said to me, "Ah, Ba Nchimunya, you are having a baby."  This made me laugh very hard and exclaim "oh no!  I'm not having a baby!"  But I understood he meant I was holding the baby.  In Tonga, the sentence would have been "Ba Nchimunya, mulajisi mwana."  Jisi is to have, and since I was holding Nchimunya, I had him at that moment.  The la in the middle of the word represents the present tense, so words with it are usually translated in the is/are -ing form.   Because I understood this, I was able to tell Ba Lenix that his translation was technically correct, but that the saying "having a baby" has a specific connotation in English that basically means "pregnant."

I'm trying to learn a bit about the local languages of Nigeria.  Hopefully, then I'll have an easier time both with Pidgin, and with their version of English.