Unfair Analogies

When my dad was a teenager, he went to visit a cousin in the States and he used the experience to polish his English. He would attend the same university classes that his cousin did and so he slowly and surely practiced his English.

He mentioned that there was a test one time that had a question he didn't understand. It had something to do with a man putting salt on the driveway because it was winter. Now, I'm really not sure what kind of problem this was or what sort of answer they were looking for, but my dad could not answer it because he couldn't get past that one idea of a man putting salt on his driveway.

Why would someone do that?

To someone who has lived his/her whole life in Guatemala and has no experience with icy environments.

When I heard that story the first thing that came to mind was how unfair that was for my dad. He had no chance.

Well, today I was reading Fiasco and an analogy immediately reminded me of that story. The author is speaking of Bush's Mission Accomplished speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln:

In both image and word that day, what Bush did was tear down the goalposts at halftime in the game.

I immediately pictured someone in India (or Guatemala) reading this and thinking "Huh?"

Even if you know something about football, unless you know quite a bit about the college football tradition of taking down the goalposts after a huge win (thank you Boston College years), then you can't relate to this particular piece of writing.

And you can take it one step further, which BC taught me: it doesn't have to be a huge win for the football team or the basketball team, it can just be a huge loss by the hockey team.

Just food for thought.

Language Issues in Pro Baseball

Here's a great article on the language gap that exists in some (probably most) Major League clubhouses.

It's an issue I'm interested in since I tried to put together a story on how journalists translate what players say and print it in the papers without explicitly saying (sometimes) that it isn't what a guy said, but a translation. All I found out was that MLB policy is pretty fuzzy—journalists can pretty much translate on their own as long as it's "basically" what the player was trying to get across.

Unfortunately, the players' personality usually gets lost in the process, which is what I was exploring. Sammy Sosa, for example, is a pompous, arrogant person when interviewed in Spanish. But in English he's the humble, simple man who was once a shoeshine boy.

It's all terribly interesting.