Lost in Translation

First of all, if you all haven’t been listening to the theme song for the World Cup or the Shakira song that goes along with it, I demand you to YouTube it right now. I love both the songs and have had them in my head for about two weeks. It doesn’t help that they are played every two seconds here. I just love World Cup hype. It’s like Olympic excitement. So that is the official soundtrack of this blog post.

Sometimes the translation between English and Kinyarwanda can be awkward and sometimes it provides the greatest clarity to a situation.

I was meeting the Social Affairs Secretary for our district a couple weeks ago. She was a lovely woman who spoke English very well. She’s one of the few Rwandans who have actually been to America. We spoke about her trip to Chicago and St. Louis for part of a conference. Naturally the conversation turned to martial status and future plans. I fired right back, asking if she was married and had children. She was indeed married and had one son so far although she’d like two more eventually. She was stressing the importance of marriage and finding a good person to share your life with. She began with ‘Being married to a wonderful spouse is like…’ and then paused. There are so many ways to end that statement I was intrigued what direction she was going to take it. “…is like a small paradise.” Ah, for once the translation was perfectly eloquent.

An interesting challenge to teaching English to the secondary students are the words that are combined into one in Kinyarwanda. For example, to love and to like are combined into one verb. The same is true for the verbs to want and to need. Trying to explain the difference is more difficult than I’d like to admit. Anyone want to give it a try?