How do you explain the inexplicable?

How do you explain the inexplicable? As an entrepreneur, I have a duty of care to my clients. I must provide them with great service, transparency, and all the relevant information they need to make their own decisions. This would be a straightforward task if you work in the legal industry or if you sell a product. You both speak the same language and you both know the desired outcome. What about language service providers? For us, it may be a little more complicated because we are dealing with different languages and cultures and one side might not have any knowledge or contact with the language or culture. So, what do you do?

Making a connection

As linguists, our duty is to make a connection between those two languages and cultures. In other words, that document our client gave us to be translated needs to be converted into something the readers of the other language perceive as native and written for them. This is why we need translators after all!

The broken link

What if there is a broken link in the process? You must solve it and restore that link as soon as you possibly can. This usually happens when there are variants in the languages you are working with.  We need to explain to our clients why being aware of these variants is essential to the success of their projects. Because if they don’t have any contact with the language they might not understand that a text in the wrong variant may damage their reputation in that country and that might be a problem for them.

Cultural assassination

This all seems doable. You can explain the diversity of the cultures that speak that language and why the variants might be so different from the main language from which they originated. But, what if the government of that country is the one trying to erase that culture and language, how can you explain it? How do you explain to your clients that the government of the country they are doing business with is trying to assassinate the culture and language of that country? Impossible isn’t it?

This is what is currently happening in Portugal, and that is the situation I and all my colleagues who work with the Portuguese Language have to face. The elected Government signed an agreement without public consultation, forcing the Portuguese to write according to the Brazilian variant of the language. No linguist was consulted, the constituents were not consulted, and no one was consulted. The result was something abhorrent and confusing.

They claimed they wanted to unify the language but all they did was create more division. People don’t know how to write, there are errors everywhere and it is an absolute disgrace. Citizens have been fighting for this for a long time, but the same corrupt politicians who signed this absurd are the ones ignoring the people who put them there!

So how can you explain to your clients why it is essential to respect the language and culture of the country they are doing business with if the government of that country is the first one to do the opposite? I try, I even try to explain what is happening here, but it is so absurd that even that is difficult. Let me try …  just think about it … what would you say if you read or someone told you that Rishi Sunak signed an agreement with all other English-speaking countries so the United Kingdom and all other countries start speaking the American variant of English?  What would you say about this? What would Kind Carles say about this? That was exactly what happened to the Portuguese. Absurd isn’t it?