Alberto Rio's Essay 'How Do You Say It?'

Aiwen (Hurphy) Zhang
Fall 2013
11/1/2013
Unit 3 Assignment: “How Do You Say It?” Final Draft

Language and Translation Language is the basic tool people use to communicate with each other, including verbal language and non-verbal language. Language is used to announce, to persuade, to queries, to express emotions, to transmit complicated ideas or even to hurt people. Generally speaking, using the language correctly allows people to communicate better, compared with animals. However, we live in a big world, which has more than 6 billion people now. With the existence of many different languages, the issues of translation are generated. After reading Alberto Rios essay – Translating Translation:
(507) In that situation, everyone is supposed to say something even yell out when finding their own are forgotten by the jailers. But the man didn’t because he had manners. This example let me think of an observation of mine. Americans say “can I have a…” when they order in the restaurant, but most Chinese are accustomed to say “I want a …” when ordering. This difference cannot jump to the conclusion that Chinese are impolite. The expression difference happens due to the difference manners of language. This kind of case is more complicated than the first example. People have the same understanding of words but different manners still cause misunderstandings. Rios select this example to tell people if you want to understand other completely, the manner behind word cannot be
(508)
Languages include body languages. By adding action description, Rios leads the focus move again, to a higher layer – action expression. Perhaps “pointing of the right hand” shows nervous in this case, so Rios notices that his student was looking for an equation but he just didn’t know how to do that and felt nervous. Rios arranging the examples in this order makes his essay persuasive because readers can reach the main idea of the essay step by step which helps his main idea to be more acceptable.
Apart from adopting three appropriate examples to express his idea, Rios also has his own unique writing style to make his essay compelling. In an interview, he said “I would say that I write in Spanish – it just looks like English.”(504) I found the entire interview from Internet, he says” I do occasionally write in Spanish, but when I do it’s from another time, from childhood, often, I listen hard for how ideas come to me, in what container they are being delivered, and I try to be true to it. Sometimes that container is Spanish. ” (Twenty-Four Questions: A conversation with Alberto Alvaro Rios) It means Rios sometimes form his ideas in Spanish although he writes in English. As a non-English speaker who but lives in an English speaking country, I got a deep feeling for this. Although I live in America where I listen English and speak English everyday, I still think in Chinese. I form my ideas in Chinese