Lost In Translation

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on the show, we're bringing you the stories of two families grappling with how best to communicate across linguistic differences. In the first story, a young man sorts through how to talk to his parents about gender in Chinese, where the words for "he" and "she" sound exactly the same. Then, we follow a family who was advised to stop speaking their heritage language, Japanese, based on some outdated and incomplete research.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Code Switch from NPR.
0:03.0	I'm Shireen Marisol Maraji.
0:05.1	Remember me?
0:06.5	I helped create this podcast.
0:07.7	I hosted it for a minute.
0:09.2	And I'm back because this episode is all about one
0:12.4	of my obsessions, language.
0:15.4	Specifically, language loss.
0:18.0	And what's lost in translation when you can't communicate
0:21.2	fluently in your parents' first language.
0:24.2	I've talked a lot about the power of language on Code Switch,
0:27.2	how language can both unite and divide.
0:30.2	I don't hate the term POC.
0:31.5	I think it's fine.
0:33.1	It's just an excuse for people and not
0:35.5	want to save black people.
0:36.8	How language is used to demonize and dehumanize
0:39.8	certain communities.
0:41.2	The major one was immigrants as animals.
0:43.4	They were pack animals.
0:45.2	They were coyotes.
0:46.4	They were poiseos.
	...

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