One of the biggest hazards of winter break is the long car ride with your parents to the houses of family friends. This is, of course, nothing more than an insidious trap to get the three of you alone so that they can ask probing questions about every detail of your life for hours on end.
Or maybe it’s just my family that does that.
I found myself surviving the onslaught this winter, until my mom turned to me in the back seat and asked in Spanish:
“So, can you tell us about your career?”
What kind of a question is that? You expect an undergraduate student to already have a career?
Of course not. The Spanish word, carrera, means not just career, but also major. The first time a relative or family friend asked me that, it took me several minutes to decipher what they were in fact asking me. In this case, I remind my parents that, in addition to taking government, I am also majoring in economía.
“So when you graduate, you are an economista, an economist?”
Wait, they really are asking me about my career?
My family is from Peru. I have lived nearly my entire life in the U.S. My parents’ brains are wired in Spanish, mine in English. Although I have been “learning” Spanish from them for the last 20 years of my life, these instances remind me that there are still times when I find myself unable to communicate with my own parents.
When learning a language, you are trained to believe that if you simply find the correct translation for the words you will be able to communicate as easily in that language as you can in English. But a dictionary only takes you so far; behind every word is an entire cultural perspective with a thousand underlying assumptions. Two people can have entirely different understandings of what a single word means. Translating connotation, without using these loaded words, is close to impossible. In the case of my car ride, my clumsy attempt to explain the difference between carrera and major nearly left my mother in tears.
In America, a college major is not the most important thing in the world, as your deans so often remind you, and it won’t set your life on an unalterable path. This word in Spanish, however, seems to have picked up much of the connotation of career, so that one’s major is also, in essence, your future life path. This understanding, I can only assume, comes from a greater emphasis from my parents experience in Peru on professional tracks over liberal arts studies: if you study medicine, you are going to be a doctor; law, a lawyer. Does it not make sense then, that if you are studying economics, you will officially be an economist when you graduate? The moment I receive my diploma, I will not immediately be an economist; I will be an unemployed graduate with an econ degree.
However, explaining that I do not have a carrera (career) yet, but rather a major, proved difficult for my parents. It seems that saying I don’t have a carrera is akin to saying I have no career path, I have no job in my future. Naturally, this led to a lot of voice-raising and “Your mother and I are spending so much money and for what?” type statements. Our conversation came perilously close to the “my son has no future” waterworks, until I finally found the right combination of words that I can only hope got my point across.
Such dramatic misunderstandings are quite rare, and I can usually be confident that the vast majority of what I’m saying gets through, even if some of my clever worldplay is lost. Explaining the nuances of language is often not worth the hassle. For now, I’m fine with letting my family believe I am going to become the next John Keynes.
