Why do misunderstandings occur and how to they inhibit knowledge acquisition?

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

Niels Krause

Theory of Knowledge

21. September. 2009

Why do misunderstandings occur and how to they inhibit knowledge acquisition?

Language and Translation errors are part of everyone’s everyday life including mine; the fact that I visit an international school only underlines the amount of miscommunication occurring in my life. Sometimes errors are made because there are no words in the other language to describe a certain situation but sometimes they are also made because one is not a “mother tongue”. There are a lot of different language situations where misunderstandings occur, these summarize into four main groups: grammatical errors, mistranslations; localization errors, and errors of inconsistency.

Grammatical errors are often found when one translating from a “simple language” to a “hard language”. I found people having difficulties translating English to German. German has der, die, and das while English doesn’t have that in its language:

Der Man translates to the man
Die Frau translates to the women
Das Haus translates to the house

This makes it hard for English speakers to translate to German. I also found difficulties translating a whole document due to the fact that it loses it context sometimes. It loses it context because some sentences can’t be directly translated ...

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Grammatical errors are often found when one translating from a “simple language” to a “hard language”. I found people having difficulties translating English to German. German has der, die, and das while English doesn’t have that in its language:

Der Man translates to the man
Die Frau translates to the women
Das Haus translates to the house

This makes it hard for English speakers to translate to German. I also found difficulties translating a whole document due to the fact that it loses it context sometimes. It loses it context because some sentences can’t be directly translated and especially with larger pieces of work. A lot of languages have the S-O-V [Subject-Object-Verb] structure while the English language has the S-V-O.

Mistranslations often occur due to ignorance, this can occur because there are many words for the same thing. There are a lot of people who learned the language but they don’t know that different words have different meanings. The word ‘bus’ is often translated into the word ‘tram’ which of course is not the same thing but because one is not a mother tongue they don’t know that. This happens in English a lot because different English teachers come from different cultures and so they use different words for the same thing. It can sometimes occur that students totally misuse that word. If a teachers uses the word tram in an indication towards travelling the student thinks that the word bus can also be used.

Localization errors often occur in media and a good example of that it the Subway system which didn’t exist in India a couple of years ago. When it was first developed it was described as an underground pedestrian path used for crossing the road. This is of course the wrong translation from the government and the media. This translation had two big problems the first one being that the translation was basically a description and that it meant nothing to the uneducated people in India. This was of course adopted by the media and made into advertising campaigns sponsored by the government. This increased the confusion by a lot.

In areas such as medicine and law errors localization errors, mistranslation errors and grammatical mistakes can be fatal. Those areas can inhibit knowledge acquisition a lot because they influence my everyday life a lot due to the fact that i’m going to a international school and it influences the life of the average person because the world is becoming more international and people are moving around a lot introducing new products and new costumes into different cultures.

(Word Count: 542)