I was reading “The Pig that Wants to be Eaten: 100 Problems for the Armchair Philosopher” by Julian Baggini, Problem #47 – Rabbit. The conundrum is about a linguistic professor starting a lexicon for a previously undiscovered language used by a lost tribe. He hopes to gain more insight to this new language by relating it to the language he knows best, which is English. However, the problem of languages is that there are words in one language that might not mean one specific term in another language. In the conundrum, the professor was trying to define the word “gavagai”. He saw that whenever a rabbit appears, the tribal folks will say “gavagai”. So his first conclusion to the definition of “gavagai” is that it must mean “rabbit”. But how is he to know that “gavagai” cannot mean “delicacy” (perhaps this tribe eats rabbits like how we eat caviar), or “god’s form” (or maybe this tribe thinks their god takes the form of a rabbit)? Both suggestions are definitely far from “rabbit”, but since I am as fluent as the linguistic professor in this undiscovered language, surely it’s not too ludicrous to say that I might be as right as he is?

And how is this related to truth?

Previously I tried to consider truth as subjective to each individual. As such, truth becomes a rather fleeting notion — something we find comfort in when all other things seem falsified, but we are uncomfortable to come to terms with the idea that there might not be such a thing called “truth”. I think this conundrum pushes me further down this rabbit hole.

Even if we accept that there is truth, I still think there is no universal truth. As demonstrated in the conundrum, people who speak my language (in this case, English) and share a similar (urban) culture agree that when a little furry animal with long ears and red eyes hops into our field of vision and we are required to name it, we will say “rabbit”. I cannot deny that this is a case of us speaking the truth. However, when people of another culture, who speaks another language, are placed in the same situation, they might not call the animal with the term that means “rabbit” in their language. They might not have a term for “rabbit” in their language, since it can very well take on another meaning which we, urban English speakers, are ignorant of, and hence not consider to be the truth.

What is considered to be the truth to people of a culture might not be truthful to people of another culture. Something that is represented by a specific term in a language might not mean the same when translated to another language. So, language and culture makes the issue of “truth” more complex than I realized! One rather practical lesson I learned from considering this conundrum is that while doing translation work, unless we’re very familiar with the cultures of the two languages, the translator is at quite a big risk of misrepresenting the original text.