Lost in Translation

There is a Russian proverb that says, “Once a word goes out of your mouth, you can never swallow it again.” Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever, but possibly not forgotten. That is the power of words to work magic or do harm. So much depends on the speaker or writer of those words, but perhaps more depends upon the way they are received or heard. The interpretation of the receiver is all; it is where the realm of misunderstanding lies.

What we send forth in our words is only as good as the meaning derived from them by the person or persons receiving them. We have no control over how our words will be interpreted. Most of us make assumptions that people will understand our words in the way we mean them. But how often have we had to correct or repair damage done by words wrongly interpreted?

Communication is so much trickier than we assume it is. Most of the time, we operate on automatic pilot, letting words fly out here and there, trusting that they will be received as we intend.

We take communication for granted and get lazy in both our speech and our writing, resulting in messes that we’re required to clean up or suffer the consequences. This is especially true with the short hand used in emailing and texting. The room for mis-interpretation goes up exponentially because the subtle nuances of tone and gesture are missing. Plus, both are often done on the fly in the midst of multi-tasking our way through the day, and blunders happen often.

I have been on both the generating and receiving end of such mishaps, and it’s not fun to have to read and re-read our words to see what may have caused such offense in the first place. Lately, I seem to be committing less and less content than I used to, to emails. I prefer the phone. With vocal tones, you can at least hear some subtle hints at mood and meaning. Not as good as being with someone and seeing each other’s eyes, but still one step closer than the flat two dimensional world of cyberspace.

I think it behooves us all to slow down the pace at which we emit streams of words that we cannot take back. Better to say very little, (although this can also be interpreted wrongly), then to say too much. I have sometimes gone back and deleted several paragraphs from an email when I’ve taken the time to re-read it before I hit send. Yes, it’s time consuming, but not nearly as much as cleaning up the fall out from someone’s hurt feelings.

I’ve always wondering at the tendency for us to apologize when we think we’ve written an overly lengthy email. If we truly think it’s too long, why not cut out some of the extras instead?

This holds true in all of our communications. Overwordiness can be due to deep insecurity that gets covered up by long drawn out explanations. Rarely, however, do people apologize for speaking too much.

I personally think it’s better to err on the side of too little than not enough, unless of course, your intention is to let someone into your head, giving them an insider’s view of how you think. This can be valid, up to a point. It is usually something reserved for people we are getting to know. By the time we become close friends, our communication takes on a short-hand familiarity which allows us to streamline our ideas into smaller bite size chunks.

For the most part, brevity and clarity are a good rule of thumb, personally and professionally. Less to generate; less to translate; less to clean up later.