On the Way Home on 15 April, 2011

On the way home today I was sitting on the bus that I take to get to the train (that I then take to get to a stop near home… it’s a pretty long trip). On the bus were a few young men that I identified as being international students: they were all young, none spoke English as their first language and there is an international centre nearby. Of them, one was East Asian in appearance and two were Western European.

Not being one to stare, I can’t describe them any better than that; they sat behind me on the bus.

Their conversation was around the East Asian student expressing that he was disappointed, as he was going to “miss his senior’s birthday” because he will be here in Australia. His two companions were both confounded by this, wanting to know what a “senior” was. The student tried to explain this in a few ways, such as “he is someone who is older than you and who is further along in school than you” and “he is someone who is higher in university than you.”

The two other students seemed to understand that part to an extent, but appeared mystified as to why such a person would be called a “senior” and why you would be sad that you were missing this person’s birthday. One of them claimed that the student was misusing the word “senior” and that it was not the right word to use.

This resulted in a dictionary being pulled out and them looking up the word. On seeing the spelling, one of the European students went, “Oh, signor, like in Italian! That just means ‘sir’ or ‘mister.’” The East Asian student insisted that this was not the case, that senior also meant “someone who knows more than you.” I got the sense that he was trying to describe an upperclassman, and possibly one who had been his mentor (hence the close relationship).

The three students then engaged an older, white gentleman sitting nearby by asking him to clarify the use of the word “senior.” He tried to explain that this is someone who is more “senior” than you. (Gee thanks, dude, veeerrrry helpful.) To his credit he clarified this as meaning “someone who is like your boss” put could also mean “someone who is older, like a senior citizen.”

The student insisted that these were still not the meanings he was after. What happened next was a 45-second period of time where the only word that was exchanged between the 4 people in the conversation was the word “senior,” spoken in a variety of accents and inflections.

By this time I was pretty sure that the East Asian student was Japanese (by his accent and by the way he was using the word “senior”) and that he was likely looking to roughly translate the word “sempai” or “senpai”. From the little I understand around Japanese culture (do correct me if I’m wrong), upperclassmen are referred to by these words in both titles as well as (respectful) nicknames. There is no singular English word that offers a full translation, but it in essence refers to a mentor or an upperclassman (i.e., a “senior” in American terms, who is in their final year of study at university or even high school).

I wonder: was I able to come to this conclusion because I was not involved in the conversation (and therefore able to observe it externally), because I have experience as a Third Culture Kid, or because I am familiar with the concept of a mentor because there are some similar concepts in my own cultural identity (seniors as upperclassmen in America and as mentors in China)?

While I will never know whether or not my presumption was correct (since the three students got off the bus shortly after the 45-second “senior” exchange), I decided to reflect on the exchange itself, for my own interest.

You had three students from three linguistic backgrounds trying to exchange a  cultural concept in a language that none of them spoke natively. It was interesting to see which words the first student chose to explain the concept, as well as how the other two students then interpreted the words he used. It was also amusing to note the confusion that all students had in how their messages were not being received as intended.

It was, in a way, a game of multilingual broken telephone (some would call them “Chinese Whispers”). If you were to tell each of the three students the same thing in their respective languages, you would end up with three different translations into English. Such is the world of cross-cultural communication, and it highlights a need for someone to know why a specific set of words were chosen to describe a single word for which there is no accurate translation.

Are they using these English words because of their limited vocabulary? Are they using these English words because they feel other ones don’t have the same meaning or connotation behind them, and these are the closest ones they can come up with? Are they choosing these words because it is how it was once explained to them? Or are they choosing those words because they haven’t acknowledged the chance that there is no equivalent concept in that other language, or in the cultures with whom they are communicating?

That’s on the speaker’s side. On the listener’s side, how are you translating the words being used back into your own language? On the one hand, it’s not grammatically correct English. On the other hand, the words being used are not the same as the ones a native English speaker might choose to explain the concept.

So instead of simply translating English to French (for instance), you are translating Japanese to Japanese-English to French. Really, no wonder we ended up with 45 “senior” seconds.