The Fall of Language in the Age of English
My family used to watch the Disney Channel’s Pepper Ann at the dinner table in Mexico City.
Minae Mizumura explores the privileges and limitations that native English speakers and native speakers of other languages experience in a time when English dominates the world stage to a higher degree than any other language ever before (more than Latin, more than Chinese). This book is part linguistic theory, part history, part closed-mindedness, and part personal narrative. I enjoyed the chapter where the author shares her own struggles when deciding how to translate one of her novels into English. This novel was originally written in Japanese with bits and pieces sprinkled poignantly in English. But when you translate the Japanese into English, what happens to the English sprinkles?
My family used to watch the Disney Channel’s Pepper Ann at the dinner table in Mexico City.
Our favorite episode was the one where Pepper Ann’s best friend Nicky, the straight-A student, gets tired of always being perfect, and she goes bad (like Rihanna but before Rihanna). In this episode, Nicky makes everyone call her Nic'kay (oh no, I just realized how racial this is), and she performs her badness by being rude to old people.
Our second favorite episode was the one where Pepper Ann has to take Spanish as an elective, because all the easy classes are full. First she isn’t invested in the class, and the flamenco-dress-wearing teacher is disappointed in her. In the end, she has a come to Jesus moment, she studies really hard, and she wows everyone with her aMAHzing Spanish skills.
This episode posed a challenge for the team translating Pepper Ann into Spanish for kiddos like me. In the Spanish translation of this episode, Pepper Ann learns Castellano, which is the term used in Spain to refer to the Spanish language. So what we see is Pepper Ann speaking Spanish with a Mexican accent during the regular parts of the episode, and when she attends her Spanish class, she also speaks Spanish but with a Spain accent.
It makes no sense, because the whole gag is that Pepper Ann can’t understand anything in class at first, but, by the end, she is fluent in Spanish. Yet when the episode is already in Spanish, the viewer just has to pretend that she is speaking two different languages. It blew my mind and bothered me, but my sister and I also thought it was legiterally hilarious. The episode ends up becoming something more that it could have ever been in English.