I recently went on an excursion to a foreign country, and it was right here in Boston. I took my girlfriend for a picnic in The Boston Common, and we decided to pick up some sandwiches and drinks at Au Bon Pain (for those who don’t know, Au Bon Pain is a chain of small cafés / sandwich shops, specializing in delicious breads).
What should have been the simple process of placing two sandwich orders ended up being a 20-minute Au Bon Pain in the ass.
To place an order at Au Bon Pain, customers take one of the menus provided, check off the sandwiches they want and hand it to the person behind the counter to prepare it.
I checked off my order for a tuna melt, a baked sandwich. My vegetarian girlfriend placed an order for a cold sandwich with just cheese and veggies.
The person preparing the order spoke very broken English, but I didn’t foresee it being a problem. As I watched her prepare the sandwich, I noticed she had begun to combine the sandwiches into one, when I had clearly marked two sandwiches on the order slip.
I stopped her and tried to explain that the sandwiches were separate, and that my girlfriend was a vegetarian.
She took this to mean I wanted a veggie wrap, which led to another set of problems. After 20 minutes of frustration for all of us, I ended up settling for a non-melted tuna melt (it wasn’t worth it to explain I wanted it baked).
As I brought the order to the sales girl, who spoke perfect English, I began to think about language in our society.
The girl at the cash register didn’t really need to interact with the customer in any way, while customer interaction was critical to the job of the girl preparing the sandwiches. This didn’t make any sense to me. Shouldn’t the person best adapted to the language have the position that deals the most with people?
Before I continue, I want to clarify a couple things. I understand that these things happen sometimes, and I’m not so pretentious as to think my one minor inconvenience is more important than anyone else’s. I think diversity is great — I love America and the fact that you can walk down a street in Boston and hear a multitude of languages. I fully support the rights of all people to come and live and work in America as equals to the people who are born here. But, I think there is an important idea here.
If you are coming to work in America and are going to work in a job that involves talking to people on a regular basis, I think it is important to learn the language. Yes, there are many languages here in America, but English is the dominant one right now.
If I moved to France, and worked at the McDonald’s there, I think many French people would see me as an arrogant American if I didn’t learn the words for basic things like cheeseburger, fries and milkshake.
I hate the stupid American stereotype that many of us have perpetuated in our travels abroad. Whenever I go outside the country, I always try to learn some key phrases and grammar structure.
English-speaking Americans should make an effort to learn at least one other language. Critical to this is introducing foreign languages earlier within the school system.
Language is taking center stage in the 21st century, and nothing demonstrates this better than the rise of Latin culture in the past few years. At the ATM, we press one for English, two for Spanish.
In the dance clubs, we dance to Daddy Yankee and Shakira while half of us are ignorant as to what the lyrics mean. And now, illegal Mexican immigration is an ongoing debate in the political arena.
At the heart of all this is the issue of language. Most English-speaking Americans don’t attempt to understand the cultures that are having a profound impact on us everyday. Many of them see it as being different — and therefore wrong — and attempt to shun it in favor of “traditions.”
On the other side of the coin, we have minority workers and immigrants, like the one mentioned before, who make little or no effort to learn the language of the place they are living in.
And so we become lost in translation. Our ethnocentricity blinds us to the surrounding world. America is in the fortunate position of being the most diverse society that the world has ever seen. However, we don’t take the time to immerse ourselves in the cultures around us, because we are too lazy to learn their languages.
This is not merely an American trend, but a global one. Technology has opened up the floodgates in terms of communication. But our inability to understand one another is drying up the water.