Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One: Online Version
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Introduction: English-speakers lost in translation
Harris of course understands none of this, and he turns anxiously to his interpreter when the director has finally finished speaking. This commercial is important to his flagging career---not to mention his wallet. He needs to understand what the director said. He is therefore counting on his interpreter. He smiles at her uneasily, waiting.
To Harris’s dismay, the interpreter gives him a single-sentence, ultra-simplified account of the director’s instructions. In fact, she just repeats what he already knew. He is supposed to raise his glass and say, “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time!” Harris knows that the director said much, much more than the interpreter revealed, but he is entirely dependent on her abilities. He wants to ask someone to wait, to stop, to have the interpreter explain the instructions in more detail. But to whom can he appeal?
When the camera rolls, Harris delivers his lines, and the director stops him, then reprimands him in Japanese for not following directions. Once again, the interpreter provides a minimal explanation of what has been said. They shoot again, Harris fumbles again, and the cycle continues. This situation becomes one of the running jokes of the movie.
Every movie requires a romantic plot (or at least a romantic subplot); and actress Scarlet Johansson plays the role of Charlotte, Harris’s romantic interest in the film. In one scene, he takes Charlotte to a Japanese hospital for treatment of a minor injury. In a continuation of the language barrier gag, Harris and Charlotte are completely unable to grasp what they see and hear. Hospital forms look like pages of random scribbles. The spoken words of receptionists, doctors, and orderlies are incomprehensible mysteries.
The misadventures of these fictional Americans illustrate a self-defeating fact about native English-speakers vis-à-vis the rest of the world:
For the most part, native English-speakers do not learn the languages of others. Therefore, we are overly dependent on the language skills of others----and their willingness (or lack thereof) to use them to our benefit…
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
