Did you know that bridges break down separation and foster connectedness across rivers, countries and people?

Bridges are symbols of approaches between one and another point. They are built in different sizes, length and materials, support weight and endure in time. Some bridges are delicate, ingenious and innovative; others are functional, sturdy or dull. Each bridge is an end product of ideas and mental ingenuity together with constant technological development and imagination. Bridges need to be safe, reliable and peer approved. They have also lots of benefits as they supplies food and traded goods. Bridges can get across obstacles or through difficult terrain in a shorter time. In economic terms, this means, that the costs of travels and trades fall and the financial benefits of increased social cohesion and sharing resources rise. On the other hand, bridges are opportunities to share all kind of ideas. And, last but not least important: an efficient distribution network, depends on bridges.

Translating is like building bridges, and translators represent these bridges. They use communication as key to all successful business and personal relationships, and this communication flows from one point of the bridge to the other. Translators’ work on written documents, and interpreters work with the spoken word, but both cross cultural bridges at a daily base, what means, they can help bridge language differences. Nobody said crossing cultural bridges would be easy. No. There are always obstacles along the way. Not all languages have words for something that exists in other languages and cultures, and not all words and ideas can be easily translated into or explained in another language. It also could be that people have weak literacy and numeracy skills in their native language, and the translated documents could be too complex or technical for them. But translators don’t give up. They try to explain with the best words and ideas whatever our interlocutor needs to know for a better understanding. Translators are humans who accumulate cultural experiences to help others to understand.

To build bridges of communication so that speakers of different languages can understand each other is the translators’ life mission. Rainer Schulte explains it very well: “To better understand the conceptual frame of translation, the image of the “bridge” can illuminate the inherent function of translation.  As we cross the bridge from one language or culture to another, a series of considerations come into play.  We begin the crossing of the bridge with the social and cultural baggage of the original cultural landscape.  As we progress across the bridge, preparations have to be made to be ready for the new landscape on the other side of the river.  The other side is the unknown, the “foreign” that we try to understand, interpret, and communicate with.  Yet, we cannot assume that the landscape on the other side has been shaped by the same cultural, historical, and social traditions as the language of origin.  Our premises of interaction within our own traditions of language and culture are in all probability not the same as those we will encounter in the foreign landscape on the other side of the river.  In view of that reality, one could create the maxim: translation is always driven by transformation and a never-ending dialogue with the other.

In the process of crossing the bridge, a mental transformation has to take place.  We have to understand that the ways we orchestrate our daily lives, our approaches to cultural phenomena, and our reactions to social behavior are probably not the same as we leave the bridge and enter a new language and cultural environment.  In other words, we have to undergo a transformation and not take our ways of thinking and understanding for granted if we want to find entrance into a new culture and a new mode of interpreting the world.  In that sense, we can say that translation is neither the original language nor the receptor language.  Translation is that which happens in the crossing of the bridge, that which is transformed in the act of crossing.  We need to stay open to the foreign to initiate dialogue and understanding.  On a more philosophical level, the concept of translation comes closest to the pulse of the present, since no two moments are the same, and we have no choice but to translate ourselves, ideally speaking, continuously, from one moment into the next.”

There is a wonderful poem I love very much. It’s called Crossing Bridges and was written by Cesar Antonio Molina. You can read it here in English or Spanish. Have a wonderful and happy weekend! 🙂