By Sophie Hu ‘26, Commentary Writer

A bowl of dates. (枣 zǎo in Mandarin) (Photo courtesy of Healthline)

囫囵吞枣(húlún tūnzǎo): To swallow a date whole. To accept without thinking. The story goes that a young guest was eating pears and dates. His host warned him about eating too many pears, which, while good for the teeth, were bad for the stomach. Similarly, the dates were good for the stomach, but too many would be bad for his teeth. The young guest thought for a bit, then concluded that he should chew the pears for a bit, then spit them out, to avoid hurting his stomach, and that he should swallow the dates without chewing. From then on, Chinese tradition has said that people who accepted things at face value without a deeper understanding were ‘swallowing dates whole.’

If I had, in casual conversation, mentioned that someone was swallowing dates whole, I would most likely have been met with blank stares and confusion. A concept that holds so much meaning in Chinese becomes virtually meaningless in English. Only when the full cultural story is told and understood can these unfamiliar idiomatic expressions start to make sense again. 

Chinese has a whole assortment of these types of four character idioms, each with its own backstory that gives meaning to their seemingly nonsensical phrasing. For example, 胸有成竹(xiōng yǒu chéng zhú): to have the complete image of bamboo in your heart, means to be well-prepared. 马马虎虎 (mǎ mǎ hū hū): horse horse tiger tiger, means to act in a careless way. I would need hundreds of pages to explain how two ideas so unrelated as a horse and tiger could be linked to the idea of carelessness.

During my years in Chinese school, I learned a whole list of these idioms and their corresponding stories. However, my interest in them was recently revitalized when I read R.F Kuang’s book, “Babel.” In the world of “Babel”, people can use magic through silver bars that are engraved with a phrase in one language on one side and a translation of the same phrase in another language on the other. More specifically, these engraved phrases lose some nuance or meaning as they are translated and a magical effect is created through the lost meaning. 囫囵吞枣 (to swallow a date whole) is one of the phrases mentioned in the book. The main character, who had invoked the magic by saying both 囫囵吞枣 and ‘to accept without thinking,’ had the sensation that he was choking on dates, since swallowing dates was the meaning that was lost. In “Babel,” the magic comes from what’s later lost in translation. However, in our world, when we do not fully understand each other, instead of magic, we are faced with misunderstandings and fear that can have grave repercussions.

Most of us do not have to worry about translating sayings and idioms in a way that preserves the important nuances hidden behind the words. Translators who spent their lives understanding the culture, stories and people of the languages they worked with, have already done that work for us. Today, we can just do a quick Google Translate search, and a meaning that is tailored to our own culture and understanding of the world, is handed to us. We have become passive, reactionary receivers of information, leading to some serious miscommunication. 

Any NA student in a language course can testify to Google Translate’s frequent mistranslations and errors. There’s even a YouTube channel, Twisted Translation, dedicated to putting popular song lyrics into Google Translation in multiple languages, ending up with memorable lyrics such as “I like shapes,” as a translation of “I’m in love with the shape of you” from Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You”. Normally, we find these mistakes funny, albeit a bit annoying. However, not all of these miscommunications are lighthearted. Serious miscommunication, as a result of people’s shallow understanding of other languages and cultures, reaches beyond the realm of technology. In 2020, a professor at the University of Southern California was suspended when he was teaching about filler words. He spoke a common Chinese filler word, 那个 (nei ge), which some students misinterpreted as the n-word. Suddenly, miscommunication and mistranslation meant much more than a moment of confusion or annoyance. 

In an increasingly global world, language is not the only thing that we lose the nuances of. People from different cultures and places, who were raised on different stories and histories and have different worldviews, confuse us. Their actions and opinions, when viewed through our personal lenses, can appear incomprehensible, similar to how Chinese idioms, when directly translated into English, can feel meaningless. This doesn’t only apply to how we Americans view non-Americans. Too often, we cannot even understand the other Americans around us, and instead of seeking that understanding, we hide behind fear and uncertainty. And, in a vicious cycle, that fear takes away the open minds and curiosity that make us willing to learn new things. 

          As individuals and as a society, we need to put the effort into learning. We need to understand the stories, the histories, the ideas, the cultural identities that are lost in translation. We cannot simply swallow the date, but actively pursue, with empathy and curiosity, the lost meanings that humanize the people around us.