A thought on translation

Eric Baković posted "Translate at your own risk" on the Language Log yesterday. The posting is worth reading, especially for those who need to trust Google translate, which is indeed a great resource. In the post, he quotes a comment on another posting:

However, there exists an important activity which clearly shows that even though the ways languages grasp the world may vary widely from one language to another, they all build, in fact, the same contents, and equivalent conceptions of the world. This activity is translation. Any text in any language can be translated into a text in another language. These two texts express the same meaning. We can therefore conclude that despite the differences between the ways languages grasp the world, all languages are easily convertible into one another, because humans interpret the world along the same, or comparable, semantic lines.

It occurs to me that in any communication there may well be a difference between what the sender understands the communication to mean and what the recipient understands it to mean. If the sender and recipient come from different cultures, as is most likely when translation is necessary, the difference in perception of meaning between sender and recipient is bound to be influenced by their cultural differences.

Think of the use of the word "crusade" as used by a Christian and heard by a Muslim!

If one is talking about a mathematical proof, perhaps the gap is not too large betwen what is meant and what is understood. If one it talking about emotions, the gap may be large indeed.