discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

More documents

Recommendations

Info

$Balloon animals -- instructions from Pioneer National Latex (sold$

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 106 106 Intercultural Communication with people. Being incarnational within a culture means being able to speak heart-to-heart with other human beings. That can be problematic to achieve when one goes to a country like Nigeria where scores of languages are spoken. If, however, missionaries want to be truly incarnational, they will remember that when Jesus came to earth, He did not speak some heavenly language that required an interpreter. He grew up speaking the languages the Jews would have spoken in that day (Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek). Language Landscape Arbitrarily Assigned Meaning One reason language learning is so challenging is that the meanings of the words and phrases of oral language have been arbitrarily assigned. There is nothing inherent, for example, in the sound of the English word cat that signals a small, domesticated feline. The act of translating will quickly highlight how arbitrary the assignments of meaning for oral and written symbols have been. Think about the English term hot dog or the phrase fixing a sandwich. Was there a canine that got overheated or was the sandwich broken? Complexity A second challenge to cross-cultural communication is that vocabulary lists from one language never match up exactly with the vocabulary lists of any other language. An English speaker uses the word love in both “I love pizza” and “I love you.” Spanish speakers, however, use two different verbs to express those sentiments. Another challenge is that some words have multiple meanings that can only be sorted through by looking at the context in which the word has been used. The Italian word piano is an example. English has borrowed piano as a label for the instrument that Italians call pianoforte. That instrument is not what piano means in Italian. In Italian, piano can mean “soft volume” or “slowly,” or it can mean the “floor of a building” (such as first floor or second floor). Which meaning is being used can only be determined from the context in which the word appears. To translate piano into English, one has to know which meaning is being used since no single English word carries all three of the meanings of the one Italian word. A third thing that makes language learning so challenging is that grammar and syntax structures vary greatly from one language to another. Some languages use verb tenses or moods for which other languages have no exact counterparts. Greek, for example, has an aorist tense that Bible translators struggle to render into languages like English. Word order within sentences also varies greatly from one language to another. In English, adjectives usually go before the noun they modify. Romance languages do it differently, putting most adjectives after the noun. Verbs have complex conjugations in languages like Por-
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 107 Intercultural Communication 107 tuguese but no conjugations at all in languages such as Haitian Creole. Languages like French use double negatives in a sentence; English does not, except in slang expressions that schoolteachers decry. These three things—arbitrarily assigned meanings, varying nuances in word meanings, and a variety of grammatical and syntactical structures—are reasons why no software program has been able to guarantee that sentences from one language fed into a computer will come out in well-formed, naturalsounding translations in another language. Sometimes such translation programs give decent results; at other times the results are abominable. For example, Babel Fish, one of the most popular online translation programs, took John 3:16 in Russian and rendered it in English in this puzzling fashion (including the two transliterated Russian words in brackets): “Since so [vozlyubil] god is peace, that he returned the son of its [Yedinorodnogo] that any believer in it, would not perish, but had a life eternal.” This does not mean ideas cannot be translated meaningfully from Russian into English. It just demonstrates that machine translation has its limits. Some words do not have equivalents in other languages because they are culture-bound. That means they refer to something that has meaning within only one culture and will thus necessitate an explanation when that idea is translated into another language. Pizza, for example, is a food that originated in Italy. While this baked, breadlike crust with various toppings is now eaten all around the world, people in most cultures have simply imported the culture-bound word pizza rather than trying to come up with an equivalent in their own language. The sport called American football has many culturebound terms: quarterback, tight end, bowl games, touchback, and first down. None of those words have natural equivalents in other languages. Because that sport is uniquely American, its specialized terminology is culture-bound. An example from the legal field would be mirandized, which in U.S. culture means that as part of the arrest procedure a police officer will read to suspects a short paragraph of their legal rights (“You have the right to remain silent. . . . You have the right to an attorney”). Even though English is a native language for the people of several countries, the word mirandized has meaning only within U.S. culture because it comes out of a specific U.S. Supreme court decision in which the plaintiff’s last name was Miranda. This does not mean that mirandized cannot be translated. It just means that an explanation rather than a single word will be needed (e.g., “The arresting officer read to the suspects a statement of their legal rights as outlined by the U.S. Supreme Court”). While Spanish is the official language of 21 countries, those countries also have words that are specific to them and are thus culture-bound. For instance, a special police force in Spain under the king’s direct control is called the Guardia Civil.
Page 1 and 2:
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:0
Page 3 and 4:
Page 5 and 6:
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31 and 32:
Page 33 and 34:
Page 35 and 36:
Page 37 and 38:
Page 39 and 40:
Page 41 and 42:
Page 43 and 44:
Page 45 and 46:
Page 47 and 48:
Page 49 and 50:
Page 51 and 52:
Page 53 and 54:
Page 55 and 56: 245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:0
Page 105: 245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:0
Page 157 and 158:
Page 159 and 160:
Page 161 and 162:
Page 163 and 164:
Page 165 and 166:
Page 167 and 168:
Page 169 and 170:
Page 171 and 172:
Page 173 and 174:
Page 175 and 176:
Page 177 and 178:
Page 179 and 180:
Page 181 and 182:
Page 183 and 184:
Page 185 and 186:
Page 187 and 188:
Page 189 and 190:
Page 191 and 192:
Page 193 and 194:
Page 195 and 196:
Page 197 and 198:
Page 199 and 200:
Page 201 and 202:
Page 203 and 204:
Page 205 and 206:
Page 207 and 208:
Page 209 and 210:
Page 211 and 212:
Page 213 and 214:
Page 215 and 216:
Page 217 and 218:
Page 219 and 220:
Page 221 and 222:
Page 223 and 224:
Page 225 and 226:
Page 227 and 228:
Page 229 and 230:
Page 231 and 232:
Page 233 and 234:
Page 235 and 236:
Page 237 and 238:
Page 239 and 240:
show all

discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?