Lost in Translation

I won’t bore you here with the retelling of my many administrative struggles.

Anyone who’s moved to a new country, or even just travelled to one, will be familiar with the hassles of getting a new phone number and SIM card, opening a foreign bank account, learning to adapt to a new currency, getting a new address card/proof of address, and the like.

As you can imagine, all these difficulties are made one hundred times more complicated when the country you’ve moved to isn’t primarily English speaking.

Perhaps the biggest misconception I had of Budapest, and of Hungary as a whole, was that everyone here would speak at least conversational English. In Budapest, it’s probably spoken widely enough that you can get by. The rest of Hungary…not so much.

Even now, my perception of the population’s English-speaking capabilities are a bit skewed because I live and work in what we call “a bubble within a bubble”. Budapest itself is a bubble of greater English-speaking capabilities than the rest of Hungary, and the company I work for is a bubble within that bubble because it’s a global company that hires people from all over the world. Our diverse workplace is made up of people from Brazil, Chile, England, the United States, Zambia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and more.

Someone recently asked me if I ever feel “discriminated against” being an English speaker living in Hungary, which I thought was an odd question.

I don’t think English speakers can ever really be “discriminated against”, because all over the world we have the upper hand. We are the privileged ones. And, unfortunately, I believe this tends to make us quite narrow-minded and entitled to be met with English everywhere we go.

How ridiculous would it be for me, I thought, to arrive in a foreign country to which I have voluntarily moved and expect locals to cater to me in my language rather than in their own mother tongue?

Even in South Africa, which boasts eleven official languages, white English speakers have an expectation that Africans (who make up the vast majority of the population) must learn English so that we can understand them.

It took me many years to recognize the extreme entitlement and privilege embedded in this expectation.

It’s why I try, now, to resist the temptation to correct someone’s spelling or grammar the way I used to, with an air of arrogance and superiority. What right do I have to act like I’m better than someone else, who might speak three or four different languages, just because I might speak better English than them? It’s why I have tried, since before moving here, to make a concerted effort to learn Hungarian, both on Duolingo and in weekly lessons. It’s why I feel ashamed or embarrassed to live on a continent where almost every individual speaks at least three languages, while I only speak one (fluently).

So no, I definitely wouldn’t say I feel “discriminated against” as an English speaker, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes find it challenging and frustrating.

Only a week after moving to the city, I visited one of the more popular Hungarian banks to try and open a bank account and was blankly informed by their sole “English consultant” (who barely spoke English) that I would have to either learn Hungarian or have a translator accompany me before I would be able to open an account there.

Several weeks later, when I fell ill and needed to take time off work, I travelled for over two hours and paid €100 to see a private expat doctor because none of the public doctors in my area spoke English.

These encounters, however frustrating and inconvenient, serve as further motivation for me to learn Hungarian so as to better understand my surroundings.

The unfortunate thing about language barriers is that there is no quick solve. Overcoming them requires patience and effort, and you’ll need to accept that it may be a good few months or even years before you feel fully comfortable speaking the local language.

However, I have found great comfort in the appreciation shown from locals when they can see that you’re trying. Having a few simple everyday phrases on hand might be a good way to show that you’re at least making the effort to learn and to understand.

And, rather than finding it frustrating or time-consuming that we have to work so hard to understand one another, I choose instead to appreciate the diversity of expression made available to us. How motivating it is to think that there are so many things I do not yet know how to say; so many sensations that may be better conveyed in languages I am yet to master.