Lost In Translation

I've just realized that any normal person coming across my blog would think that I hate this place and that I am a very unhappy person. That is not the case. We're always hardest on the ones (and places) we love, yeah? I mean, if I wasn't irredeemably tied to this place and its people, I don't think I would find it so easy to criticize everything. So the point is, although I might sound all doomsday/fire and brimstone-like, I'm not. I do care about things. And because I care about them, I'm emotional about them. I'm just afraid that the only impression I give is that I'm emotional and that I fail to convey the caring and meaning behind all of it.

It generally seems like we misinterpret a lot of things. It is this horrible, permanent language barrier caused by the fact that we all speak our own languages. I'm not referring to the problem of me speaking English as a first language and you speaking Russian or Spanish or Arabic as a mother tongue...I'm talking about the fact that we all have our own language that we speak with ourselves. And this language is one that we are completely incapable of teaching to others, one that we fumble to translate into spoken words. But that's the problem. It's always a translation. It's never what you actually mean, it's just a good approximation of it. I know this sounds like a bad summary of Wittgenstein's musings on private language, but it's true. We are always translating ourselves and, as all of us at this multilingual school know, there are always things that get lost in translation.