Meanings are not in words, they are in people

I was sitting at the dinner table in Switzerland with my wife’s mother and uncle along with my two children. Someone said something interesting and I innocently said in German what I thought was the English equivalent of “holy smokes.” I immediately realized that I had said something wrong when Esther’s jaw dropped, and her face reddened like a beet. Apparently calling anything other than God “holy” is considered in religious circles in Switzerland to be breaking the third commandment about not taking the Lord’s name in vain. In English, we have countless expressions using the word holy and use them with frequency. “Holy guacamole” is my recent favorite.

On the other side of the table, my face had reddened numerous times when I heard many good, pious Swiss people throw the “S” word around in dozens of apparently good German expressions without any hesitation or embarrassment. These are two simple examples that proves the aphorism in my title to be true. “Meanings are not found in words, they are found in people.”

What makes a word “dirty” or “impolite,” is defined by people in a given time and culture. Words can shift in meaning over time as well. The word “gay” is a good example. Two blocks from me in my town there is a “Gay Street.” I don’t think the namers had the current meaning in mind when they assigned a name for the street. Even more obscure in meaning, my conservative Mennonite culture distinguished between us and the world by calling us “plain people,” and whom we considered the world “gay people.” Again, I don’t think they had the contemporary meaning in mind. “Meanings are not found in words, they are found in people.”

This aphorism applies to translation work as well. Many people think that translating is word-for-word, or at least phrase-for-phrase. It isn’t that simple. I’m not talking only about “dirty” or “impolite” words. I recently translated a document from English into Spanish that had many cultural nuances which could have been seriously misunderstood had I translated portions of the document word-for-word. The amount of head scratching I had to go through to try to convey the proper cultural nuance was agonizing. I was looking for the meaning behind the words; the cultural intricacies. Google translate, however good it has become, can’t do that.

Bureaucratic and technological lingo present potential problems as well. We take for granted that our way of doing business and talking about it are universal. They are not. Technology is changing so rapidly that words for new equipment or concepts are not standardized and vary from country to country. A simple example from the current pandemic is the word for “facemask.” It is called “tapacaras” in some Latin American countries and “mascarillas” in others.

Be careful what you call “holy” in Switzerland and endure without embarrassment German language speakers using the “S” word in their ordinary speech. Afterall, “Meanings are not found in words, they are found in people.”