The Language of Love Trains
My favorite sentence I ever heard in the English language was one that I heard in a random conversation many years ago. We were talking about trains. I think it was my brother who said in reference to how obsessed train enthusiasts can be:
“You know people who like trains… They, like, love trains.”
Which immediately raised a question in my mind: what are love trains?
This sentence illustrates an example of parsing, how our brains digest a sequence of words and process them into meaningful chunks. Besides being a critical skill for translators and interpreters, it's something we are doing subconsciously all the time whenever we listen to and understand speech. We don’t really think about parsing until something gets derailed, as in the case above. In the sentence as the speaker intended it, the word “love” functioned as a verb, and the word “like” before it was a filler word. In the split seconds of hearing and processing the sentence, I miss-parsed it, hearing “like” as a verb, and “love” as an adjective describing trains.
This is also why context and background knowledge are so important when we’re interpreting from one language to another. Words and phrases with very different meanings can sound quite similar, or even identical. Our minds are considering all the possible meanings and discarding the ones that don’t make sense or don’t jive with our prior knowledge about what we know to be true, reasonable, or relevant.
Here's another case study that highlights this point. One day I was walking near a lake while wearing flowing robes, and I was very flattered when I heard some people in the distance say:
“That’s King Zion over there.”
If I knew the name of the land mass across the lake, I may have parsed this sentence differently. They were probably saying “that’s King’s Island over there.” Say the two sentences out loud- they sound really similar, right? Even though the division between the words happens in different places. It’s our brains doing the parsing that decide whether the “Z” sound represents the possessive suffix “‘s” at the end of the word “King”, or the beginning sound of the following word.
Context is critical to understanding things correctly. That’s why before an event, interpreters will request information about the program and speakers, so they can do their research and learn as much as they can about the subject matter. But in real life outside of interpreting, I’m not always as successful at picking up context clues.
While I’m writing this, I’m getting ready to depart for the airport with a group of visitors, and one of them came down to the lobby with her bags.
“I’m overweight.” she said.
I didn’t quite know how to respond. She didn’t look overweight to me, but I knew saying anything about someone’s weight could be considered rude, so for lack of something better to say I responded, “Why?” I guess I meant why did she think that she was overweight- it wasn’t a very well thought out response.
But then I realized she was referring to her carry-on luggage weighing more than 50 pounds. It wasn’t even an issue of parsing- both sentences are actually identical- but rather it’s the semantic and pragmatic aspects of language that come into play here. The personal pronoun “I” in “I’m” here seems to refer not to the speaker themselves, but to their stuff. I guess it's similar to if we’re talking and you say “I’m parked across the street.” Presumably it’s not you, but your vehicle that’s parked over there. Context is everything!
These kinds of comical misunderstandings can become compounded when we’re crossing between different languages with totally different structures and different cultural contexts. But have no fear- Rosetta Languages got your back! Email us at info@rosettalanguages.org or send a text or WhatsApp message to (1)-617-909-3522 and we’ll make sure your messages get communicated the way you intend them!
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