When Luigi arrived, he was, believe it or not, a weirdo. He looked like a garden gnome, but one whose father happened to be Don somebody of the something-or-other family, and he could have you killed if he had wanted to. Fortunately, all he wanted to do was learn languages. So, he had spent his whole life studying languages in different countries all over the world.
For some people, there seemed to be a fine line between genius and insanity. But for others, it was simply an advantage.
An American professor at our university, Dr. Don, gave me a very difficult translation to do, for a lot of money. He also gave me the phone number of someone who could help me.
“If you get stuck, call my friend Pamjeet Singh.” Professor Don told me. “He is the greatest translator who ever lived, and also my best friend. If he doesn’t have an answer, he will know how to find one.”
So much of what Don taught us was that being a good translator was not predicated on being good at speaking a language well, but on knowing how to do research, and finding the answers. Pamjeet Singh was a master of this.
Although Pamjeet Singh was known as one of the best German-to-English translators in the world, he was not an English native speaker. His native tongue was Urdu but he also spoke Hindi and a number of other Indian languages. After earning a Masters degree in Physics, in India, he decided to learn German, and come to Germany to continue his education. He moved to Berlin and earned a masters degree in German. Then, he entered a PHD program and was writing a book on an area of artificial computer intelligence, which was related to psycholinguistics. It was the only book ever written on the subject, and Pamjeet Singh was, of course, the world’s foremost authority in this area.
During his PHD studies, Pamjeet Singh moved to Germersheim to complete a masters in translation, while he continued his study of psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence. Constantly working as a lecturer and translator, Pamjeet Singh was also writing and publishing. He was slowly becoming wealthy, and yet lived in the basement of an old widow woman, who put any umber of restrictions on him, as conditions that he be allowed to live there.
“Why doesn’t Pamjeet Singh move out?” I asked Don.
“He would never do that.” Don explained. “The widow who he rents the apartment from was the wife of a very famous translator. Her husband worked in the field for about sixty-years, publishing a number of books on the subject. He also wrote a number of dictionaries. In addition to this, he amassed a tremendous library of very rare translation books and specialized dictionaries. The governments of many countries have to come to the widow, offering to buy the books from her. But she won’t sell them. They have deep emotional value for her, because they are the legacy of her dead husband. In fact, the way Pramjeet Singh met her is that he went to her house, to try and convince her to sell him a few of her husband’s books.
When she refused outright, Pramjeet Singh proposed that he move into her house, pay her an exorbitant rent, but then he would have access to her husband’s library. She agreed. And Pramjeet Singh has been there ever since. Among the translation community, there is a rumor that the widow put Pramjeet Singh in her will, and that he will inherit the books when she dies.”
“Is it true?”
“I asked Pramjeet Singh that same question.” Said Don. “He said. Don, I hate that old bat. If I found out for sure she had put me in the will, I would push her down the stairs, the same day.”
Pramjeet Singh truly believed that language acquisition was the same, no matter what the language. Since we are all capable of learning one language, our native tongue, we must be capable of learning any language. Sometimes, when I see little Taiwanese children speaking Chinese so fluently, I think, “They must be really smart.” I struggle through Chinese, but here, even small children speak it fluently.
Dr. Don invited me to work as a research assistant on a project he and Pramjeet Singh were publishing on language acquisition theory. The project was designed to study first language acquisition by children, to see if this would unlock the key to learning other languages. After they completed their research, and developed a written theory of language acquisition, they wanted to put it to the test. They gathered several volunteers from among the student body. At first, they thought of applying the theory to learning one of the languages offered at our school. The choices included the twelve (at that time) EU languages, plus Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Polish. The problem was that even if they could screen the volunteers, and eliminate people who already spoke one of these languages, there was no way they would be able to find test subjects who had never had any exposure, of any kind, to these languages.
The EU languages, of course, were very common. Russian and Polish were widely spoken in our village. And, even in the case of Chinese, we had all been to a Chinese restaurant, or watched a kung fu movie. Instead, they wanted a language that would be completely foreign to everyone. Eventually, they settled on Latvian. They brought a teacher over from Latvia, and they began studying the language, using their new techniques.
The results of their research supported their theory, basically that learning language, any language is all the same . Latvian children find it no harder to learn Latvian than do Mexican children learning Spanish, or Brooklyn children learning English. (Yes, I know, some Brooklyn children don’t exactly speak English. So this was a bad example. But you know what I mean.)
Pramjeet Singh’s theory went even further. He believed, somehow, that you didn’t need to learn a language to be able to understand it, speak it, or write it, because all forms of human communication where the same. When we worked together on this translation, we needed very specialized dictionaries, which dealt with chemical properties and processes. Often we couldn’t find a dictionary that dealt with these subjects, specifically. So, Pramjeet Singh would draw on his tremendous knowledge, and go to other sources for parallel information. One example was that our translation dealt with preparing long-life, processed foods, which were packaged, and shipped all over the world. There was a detailed explanation of the chemical-freezing process, which we had to translate. No known dictionary dealt with this process, for food.
“I believe that the chemical freezing process for steel production is similar to this one for food.” Said Pramjeet Singh.
So, we called around, and got the leading dictionary for metallurgy. And, sure enough, we found many of the answers we were looking for. Next, we needed information about how tar was processed, and used as a preservative for food. Pramjeet Singh suggested that tar processing was similar to rubber processing. So, we checked with rubber manufacturers. But, the only dictionaries we could find were produced in Italy and they translated German into Italian and French.
When Pramjeet Singh showed me the dictionaries, he was so happy. “Now we have all of the answers.” He said.
“How do you figure that?” I asked. “These dictionaries don’t have English.”
“They don’t have to.” He said.
“Do you speak French and Italian?” I asked.
“No.” Said Pramjeet Singh.
“So, how will you use these dictionaries?”
Pramjeet Singh looked at me like I was crazy. “The answers are right here.” He said, pointing at some foreign words that I couldn’t read.
“Don’t you see it?” He asked.
The answer was: No, I didn’t see it. When I told Don about this incident later, he said. “Pramjeet Singh exists on such a higher intellectual plane, he doesn’t understand that there are people who neither see, nor understand what he does. To him all languages are the same.”
Don went on to tell me about how Pramjeet Singh had made a lot of money doing translations for financial institutions in Switzerland, who couldn’t find specialized translators for their subject matter. “Pramjeet Singh doesn’t speak French, Italian, or Romanche, or any of the Swiss languages, except German. And yet he was able to do these translations that no one else could.”
I though about Pramjeet Singh a lot as I practiced writing “My pencil is yellow.” And, “Do you like my new car?” in Chinese. The point of this whole story is: I’m no Pramjeet Singh. And I don’t exist on that plane. But Don, Frank, Pramjeet Singh, Uta, or any of my old classmates would agree. Learning another language is just another thing. Since I left Germersheim, my classmate Uta has become 100% fluent in Danish. And, Frank became fluent in French without even setting foot in a classroom.
When the alien mother ship finally arrives, Pramjeet Singh will be the only one who can talk to them. He’ll make lots of money and they will put him in charge. Maybe Valdma already is one. The rest of us will be sent out to labor in the fields, and if we complain, Pamjeet Singh and his UFO buddies will say, “Shut up and eat your pudding.” But we won’t understand, because our brains just don’t work that way.
