What have horses taught me about translation and communication?

Inter-species communication is necessarily telegraphic in nature. Horses and humans are curious to understand one another, and although our languages are very dissimilar, we can agree on the meaning of certain gestures, commands, expressions, postures.

Rider on horse in water in forest

Of course, horses communicate with each other almost entirely through body language, and apply their preternatural ability to read the moods and intentions of their fellow creatures to their interactions with bipeds. Although they only learn to discern a few human vocalisations, they thus manage to communicate very subtly with their ape overlords by interpreting our posture, tone, gaze and every slight change in muscle tension.

We have to be highly motivated and sensitised to communicate effectively with members of another species, to understand their moods, how they interact with one another, their driving motivations and, in the case of horses, their idea of where we both stand in the hierarchy that is central to their existence – and to also take into account other, limiting factors such as which side of their body is suppler, or from which side they spook more easily. And if horses have taught me one thing, it is that you also need to have a lot of respect for your interlocutor.

Leaving aside the possible motivations for each side of horse-human interactions, what can they tell us about how communication works between different cultures, or even between people from the same village or the same family? The keys to communication with both horses and our fellow humans are clarity, curiosity, sensitivity, perspective, and respect. A large part of communicating is listening. Our cognitive functions are in a constant process of interpreting the fragmentary information permeating our senses from the environment, connecting and making sense of it (even where sometimes there is none). If we take a step back when communicating, we leave space to understand the context, mood and intentions of our interlocutor. Their true message.

The translator's role is not just to convey the bones of a message, but to replicate the way in which a text has been written: its tone, intention, context. Its overall impression. You have to imagine the person who has written it, in their environment (historical, physical, social), to wonder about their intentions in doing so. And then imagine a similar person in the target language and "listen" in your imagination to how they would express the same intentions and ideas, and to whom.

And the motivation for immersing myself in this complex process? If it were just to earn a living, I wouldn't spend hours contemplating every sentence, imagining how it sounds, checking the natural rhythms like a series of hoofbeats, going over the same paragraph a hundred times. My motivation is the fascination for how language itself works, this fundamental and ennobling part of our identity and human legacy. The pleasure in touching it, weighing words, like a collector carefully studying her precious objects. And the intrinsic joy of creating.