XplanaZine

I was on a trip from NYC to Boston with my friend Alex yesterday and we were discussing our experiences as bi-lingual and bi-cultural children.

Alex was born in Cuba and raised here in the States. He made his parents proud by going to an Ivy League school and has had a successful career as a CIO. I was raised in Central Texas and learned the Spanish language and culture on the streets. I later turned that avocation into my vocation as a teacher and administrator.

What the two of us have in common are lots of stories about things in our lives that have gotten lost in translation. Particularly hilarious are the situations that arise out of living in two cultures simultaneously and without always being aware that not everyone has double-sided vision like we do.

Alex tells a really funny story about his wedding. In the Cuban community, wedding guests bring money for the bride and groom and hand over their envelopes when they enter the church for the ceremony. According to him, you’re supposed to give an amount that will at least pay for the cost of your own plate etc. at the wedding — between $50 and $75. Well, when Alex got married he invited his friends from school and one of them, who was not Cuban, made the trip to attend. And, since he really valued his friendship with Alex, he bought a gift — the thing to do if you’re a North American headed to a wedding — had it wrapped, and carried it into the church.

The only problem was that there wasn’t any place to put the gift really since no one brings gifts like that to a Cuban wedding. in addition, all the older ladies who were helping in the reception area, kept giving the friend strange looks because he didn’t bring an envelope with money. Finally, he asked Alex what was going on, and Alex simply took the present from him and told him not to worry about it. I’m not sure if Alex and his wife ever got around to opening it.

As we were sharing our stories about weddings, quineañeras, and other cultural encounters, I realized that these experiences have a lot in common with being an evangelist for educational technology. Such a calling necessarily requires that we exist in two cultures simultaneously. It means working with different vocabularies depending on which community we’re with, and it means doing a lot of translating. It can also lead to some funny stories about things that get lost in translation.

These stories include giving a talk on blogs and having someone think we’re was referring to a type of food. Or getting a question about wikis from a colleague who thinks it refers to a kind of furniture. And don’t even get me started on RSS.

The bottom line is that we find ourselves trying to explain something that is natural for us to others for whom it is entirely foreign. It’s something that, thankfully, I’ve been doing all my life. The key to success, of course, is getting people from different cultures to mingle and, through the process, to develop a bit of bi-lingualism or bi-culturalism of their own. This will lead to new ways of thinking about the educational culture in general and will help get us as evangelists out of the primary role as translators.

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