I was reading some American space opera stories, because I’m not dignifying that with the term SciFi. One thing seems to be a constant – “humans” in those stories are in fact a metaphor for Americans, and “aliens” are a metaphor for various non-American human nations of Earth. If you watched enough Star Trek, you’ll know what I mean. Also, how do you know that an American wrote a certain story? Because they implicitly assume that every language is basically English, but spoken with different words, that can be translated 1:1.
The only exception to that nonsense that I can remember was the “Darmok” episode of TNG, where they encounter a civilisation that keeps referencing their myths to explain current experience, for instance “Darmok and Jalad on Tanagra”, or “Shaka, when the walls fell”. Basically, it’s like a reference to “Achilles’ heel”, “opening the Pandora’s box”, or “David and Goliath”. This is actually a great example of why translating things between very different cultures while retaining the nuance of meaning is hard, and in order to understand what a Chinese would mean by “jade mind”, you need to do quite a bit of reading of their mythology and symbolism; also, good luck translating kitsune or qilin.
Basically, in order for an American to truly understand some fundamentally un-American culture, such as Chinese or Indian, they would have to do so much reading and abandoning their own mental position in order to get into another’s skin, that they would stop being Americans, because what seems to define Americans assuming that they are the top of the world and the only valid measurement of value and achievement. And we are talking about understanding merely another human culture, not something profoundly alien, like an octopus that communicates through chromatophores and tentacles, or a dolphin that probably thinks in idiom that would be as foreign to us as phrases such as “bitter anguish” or “sweet recollection” to someone who lacks a sense of taste because they feed on sunlight.
I was asked, many times, why I use sanskrit or Tibetan terms to describe certain states of consciousness or spiritual substances, and the underlying assumption is that those words can be translated to English or Croatian for that matter, and I’m just making it difficult. The thing is, if I’m not translating it, it means that there is no word or phrase of equivalent meaning in the target language, and I’m leaving it in the original because that’s how it works. The people who discover something get to name it. The Americans discovered certain elements such as Americium, Berkelium and Californium, and they got to name them. What are the names of those elements in Chinese? There aren’t any, because they were unknown to the Chinese. Every language has names for copper, tin and iron, though; guess why. So, now that the Americans discovered those elements, everybody in every other culture will use those words to reference them, because that’s how it works. That’s also why there aren’t translations for brahman, kundalini, vajra, mantra, mudra or mandala. It’s not because I’m making it hard for no reason, but for the same reason the Mongols have no word for Einsteinium. Your language has no word for vajra because no member of your culture had enough experience with it to try to conceptualise it; as Wittgenstein would say, if you don’t have a word for it, it is beyond the limits of your world.
Sometimes, in order for you to be able to understand something really alien, you need to leave your own skin and become an alien being with an alien understanding, and leave your words, cognition and feelings behind completely. Then, you will possibly formulate new words for those experiences, and thus make them something within your world, and maybe you’ll abandon words completely. Some things are, in fact, more efficient for conveying emotion or meaning; just listen to cats formulating a long whining tirade of complaint and you’ll see what I mean. So, in order to express emotion, Cat might be more suitable than English, because it expresses emotion directly rather than just map and reference it.
Explanation of real things that are beyond the experience of the audience is a serious problem, and a good example is Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompei and Herculaneum in 79 AD. He made an incredibly accurate and specific description of the eruption and the ash cloud, and yet it was historically seen as a metaphor of some kind because people in the West didn’t actually experience a pyroclastic eruption of that kind until Mt. Pinatubo, at which point they saw the ash cloud that looked like a pine tree, and said, hey, this looks exactly like Pliny the Younger’s description. Now, that type of volcanism is called a Plinian eruption, in his honour.
That’s another problem in describing things: you can be extremely accurate and specific in your description, but if your audience doesn’t have the experience you can invoke in order to form understanding, they will think you’re using metaphors or just talking about things that aren’t real, like fairies and unicorns. So that’s another very real limit of symbolic communication – it works by referencing another’s experience, and if there isn’t any to reference, you have a problem. Try describing some kind of an exotic fruit such as cherimoya or durian to someone who hasn’t seen and tasted it, and you’ll see the problem. Have them see and taste it and then give them the word for it, and now suddenly you have understanding and communication.
