I’m passionate about language.
One of the toys I’ll always love is “language”. Languages make pretty great toys with their unique natures and flexibility. There are wildly interesting worlds within all language systems.
English is elastic, with layer upon layer of clauses a sentence can be almost infinitely long.
Chinese is diverse, with each word having maybe a hundred possible meanings, only to be precisely defined in a given context.
Japanese is a language of liberty, where you put the subject at the start and verb at the end, the order of everything else doesn’t matter much.
The process of learning a new language is akin to absorbing a new way of thinking. Sometimes I can’t help thinking the way we speak defines the people we are.
After that comes the fun of translation. It’s much like pottery or blacksmithing, only totally free from all the mess. Rip a paragraph apart limb by limb, cut each part a bit, twist it, add some clay, reassemble, bake it. It feels rather fulfilling when I manage to reshape something from one language into another, complete with what’s clearly said (the words themselves) and what’s not (cultural background, and context). Translation might work, but personally it feels more like a game of never ending fun and challenges.
This passion belongs to Kane, our head of research.