What we actually mean by what we say?

Do we really know what we say. How often we have to say “No,no, that is not what I meant” even though we had said it. So whose mistake is it? Mind or tongue ? Well the guess is it is a communication failure but inside ourselves it is gross misunderstanding.

How the mind works?

Mind is an ancient apparatus. It dates back to the time when we had not developed language. In perhaps even before that, when we were not communicating at all. Or perhaps none of these two but for peculiar reason, the mind stores the memory data in pictorial format not in any language. When we communicate, we always reflect from memory. The pain, the hurt is not that of today only but also from the past. Similar events clubbed together. Similarly the joy is also that from the past, not just now. A moment from similar basketball game seen and enjoyed in the past sticks like another layer over the present joy and voilà here gets an expletive out of mouth “the same one spoken 14 years ago but in different company.” Of course we never meant that expletive for the present audience.

The witness

The fact that we actually did not mean what we said now has a witness. It is non lying machine called Google Translator. Lets read this explanation of errors by Google Translator

“When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be……..This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called ‘statistical machine translation.’ Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyze in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages.” (source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/02/tech/web/gmail-translation/)

So the statistics do not lie. A number of translations happen to be wrong because the people did not mean what they said and the human translator could understand but the machine did not.

Though some time we lie. We actually had intended to say what we say but we just pretend that this happened by some non-existent reason.

© Sandeep Bhalla