Published in The Prague Post, c. 2000. Text from the author's final draft; the printed version may differ slightly.
Linguists' jokes often fail to amuse the uninitiated but some are worth thinking about. Here's a bon mot I heard recently: "If translation was possible, it wouldn't be necessary." Even if this hasn't brought on an attack of the giggles, it has much truth to it. It explains for a start why good translators charge so much. These people daily achieve the impossible at great pains as they try to wrench meaning out of one sentence and poor it into another.
But there's more to it than that. Imagine you're a new manager at a Czech company and are making a little speech to your Czech colleagues during a coffee break. This is what you say: "Well, I know this is going to be a challenge but with good training for the senior staff we can develop all the skills necessary to improve the cash flow in this outfit. Eh. Pass me some of that bread, will you? And I think I'll have some soda to drink." This simple statement contains no fewer than eight words that will have your Czech colleagues shake their heads in puzzlement. The thing on the table you're pointing at isn't bread, and there isn't any soda around. Why you should send the old employees to a schooling session to learn how to do something the nature of which is unclear but has most likely something to do with working with mechanical tools remains a mystery. What exactly you mean by words such as challenge and develop, Czechs can only guess at.
Neither English nor Czech are particularly exotic languages but they are full of these little catches which will cause you pain whether you're trying to learn Czech or speaking in English with seemingly fluent Czechs. In this column, I will present a series of expeditions into the swamps of language difference. We will have a look at words and grammar points at the center of English which seem to be missing from Czech and all those useful things Czechs would like to see in English. Not to be completely pessimistic we will also uncover some unexpected parallels between the two languages.
We often think about two languages as two parallel lists of words and translation as a process of simply matching one to the other. One look at a translation generated by a computer which has been programmed to do this, will cure you of this misconception. Language is so deeply entrenched in our bodies and cultures that to translate the simplest of words often requires a long explanation of the cultural background. Of course, it is rather impractical to add footnotes to translations of your business correspondence but a newspaper column is perhaps best suited for the task. It's not easy but somebody has to do it. So let's get to it.