GUEST COLUMN, John Richard Schrock, Education Frontlines
Dump out a large box of color crayons and ask a Western child to line up the colors. They will place yellow next to orange next to red. Ask an Asian child to line up the colors and they will place yellow next to brown and they see no relationship to orange and red. And they have good reason for their alignment: soils vary from what we call yellow clay to rich brown topsoils. Therefore they have one word in Chinese: “huang.” Yellow is “light huang” and brown is “dark huang.” And this variation in “one color” is obvious in nature.
Another case is our Western color “green.” And when I put on some combinations of green shirt and pants, my wife tells me “they don’t go together.” Chinese use two names for colors we place under green. One term is a mineral-colored green that describes the range of greens seen in jade that blend into black. The other is a vegetable-leaf light green. Chinese wives do not have to tell their husbands that their clothes don’t match.
These differences in use of terms for color extends into all aspects of life and the words we use. As English editor of a science journal that receives new research from Asian scientists, I am aware of the significant differences. Science terms are exceptions to this cultural variation because they are well-defined in the “methods and materials” section and narrowly align with real world phenomena. But the general non-science words, both Asian and Western, vary with a wide variety of meanings.
When speaking on science editing, I often hold out both hands with two fingertips from one hand touching the fingertips of the other hand. Each hand represents a “matching” word in two different languages. Of the five meanings of the word on one hand, only two match the meaning of the translated word on the other hand. Each supposedly equivalent word has meanings that do not match the supposedly equivalent translated word. Digital translation devices do not begin to detect the variations.
This becomes very evident if I get a document in Chinese and I ask Google Translate to provide the translation. In nearly every sentence, I encounter words the program did not get correct, and I type in a better equivalent to correct it. And in some cases, there simply is no single-word equivalent.
This matching of terms is closer in languages that are closer-related, that have more recently evolved from the same earlier languages. Thus English will have fewer machine translation mistakes when translating German or French since they all evolved from a Greek and Latin origin. And European and American languages reflected less-crowded societies and more independent cultural values. Asian languages developed a completely different view in a world where they lived elbow-to-elbow even in earlier times.
I am reminded of this language difference every time I step out into public spaces in America and witness very few people wearing face masks. Throughout Asia, from Seoul to Shanghai to Singapore, everyone walking the streets is wearing face masks to protect others.
“In Chinese there is no word for ‘individualism.’ The closest one can come is the word for ‘selfishness’.” This quote is by Richard E. Nisbett in “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why” released in 2003. Nisbett provides many examples of how Asians and Westerners “...have maintained very different systems of thought for thousands of years.”
Today, they do not understand what we mean by “rights” and “individualism.” Our “rights” translates into their “responsibility.” Our “individualism” translates into “selfishness”—which it is. Asians think in terms of an individual’s “responsibility” to a group. Digital devices cannot explain these differences.
Our corporatized U.S. higher education is now driven by tuition and has undergone a massive cancellation of foreign language programs. While many state boards of education have added biliteracy seals to high school diplomas, our universities have shut down the language departments that trained foreign language teachers. In 2023, the Modern Language Association documented the serious loss of foreign language enrolments well beyond lowered university attendance: “German declined by 172 programs, French by 164, Chinese by 105, and Arabic by 80....” MLA concludes “Language enrollments are declining at a time when the need for knowledge of world cultures and languages is growing in many sectors of the workforce.” And educationists promote digital devices as a substitute of genuine learning.
A review of Nisbett’s book concludes: “Understanding the thought processes of other cultures may very well turn out to be critical to the survival of Western civilization....”
