Language moves the camera

I think of someone running across a street. In French, I can say Il traverse la rue en courant: he crosses the street running. In German, Er rennt über die Straße: he runs across the street.

The person reaches the same place, but the sentence organises the scene differently. Traverser tells me about the path first. Rennen tells me directly how the person moves. Running can be a detail I add, or already part of the verb. As if each language moved the camera slightly.

What happens when we learn another language but keep putting everything where we would in our own? We may know the words and construct a correct sentence, yet still need to become familiar with what that language usually makes more visible. That interests me more than finding a perfect translation: noticing what changes position when we tell the same story.

And we do not have to change languages to shift the focus. Simply say “Marie has closed the door” with the emphasis on a different word.

If I stress Marie, I might be clarifying who closed it. If I emphasise has closed, I may want to point out that she did not leave it open. If I insist on the door, someone might have been talking about the window.

The words are still there, but we are no longer answering the same question. I find it curious how much we can change through our voice, a pause or a small movement of the head. And how much can disappear when all that becomes a written message.

We can even reconstruct time from how a situation is presented. In “the person who was standing by the door ran outside”, it is easy to imagine someone standing still first, then moving, even without the word “before”. The wording gives us clues for ordering what happened.

These differences do not mean that each language confines us to a way of thinking. Context, experience and what we are trying to understand also play a part. Nor can I be sure that a sentence produces the same image for someone else as it does for me. But they leave me with a question I like to bring to translation: have I preserved both what happens and what I wanted to highlight?

Sometimes I find equivalent words and feel that something is still missing. Then I look at the scene again. Perhaps I had put at the centre a detail that stayed in the background in the other language.