Dilemmas of a “Mama(e) in Translation”

Last Fall I was walking through a grocery store with my then three and a half year old son in the shopping cart when, out of the blue, he asked me the following question (in Portuguese): “Mama, why don’t you talk to me in English?” This candid question baffled me because I could not give him any simple answers. First, the question made me sad because it displayed my son’s desire to know English, and second, it actually got me thinking hard about the reasons for our monolingualism at home and ways to give our sons more exposure to English. 

My son actually thinks he can “speak” English, but what he generally talks is a mixture of the English words he knows and gibberish, but he is trying, though. For a while my husband and I were actually worried about his gibberish “English” because he did sound pretty silly talking like that to our neighbors, but we realized it is a natural process, and I do remember pretending to speak foreign languages (English in particular) when I was a child. When we visit Brazil people often ask him whether he speaks English and while sometimes he is happy to reply that he speaks only Portuguese, sometimes he likes to emphasize that he “speaks some English too!” In one of these interchanges this past January, he was talking about speaking Portuguese, but then changed his mind and emphasized his knowledge of “some English.” Since one of the young women he was talking with had already walked up the stairs to her apartment, he pleaded to the remaining one, pointing up, “Don’t forget to tell her that I can speak some English too!”

My son’s desire to learn English is intensifying as he becomes more social and yearns to communicate with people around him, but it was not always there. It is interesting to note that back in the days when he was a baby and we were speaking English to him four days a week, some of his first words were in English. His very first word was our cat’s name, which is Blues (he said Boo), the second was the verb mamar (pronounced mamah), which means to breast (or bottle) feed in Portuguese, and the third was bye-bye (bah-bah). So there was a short time when two thirds of his words were English ones! As I explained in my first column, we stopped speaking English to him after a month with my in-laws from Brazil when he was around nine months. Of course we still interacted with our neighbors and friends in English, and I always read at least one of his favorite picture books in English, Goodnight Moon (by Margaret Wise Brown), but most of the other books I translated into Portuguese as I read. I also got in the habit of translating for him when we are talking to people and once in a while even when he is watching a TV program in English (we do have many tapes and DVDs in Portuguese, as well as books, I should add). Nowadays I’m trying to read as many of his books as possible in English without translating, but he protests, he wants me to read in Portuguese. I guess he has become addicted to my translating, and I am aware that it is my fault. My constant translation of books and even conversations has certainly had a role in inhibiting my sons’ knowledge of English, since they spend most of the time at home with me or daddy and, presently, my Brazilian parents. I have become, ultimately, a “mama in translation,” hence my blog’s name “Mama(e) in Translation” (Mamãe is mama or mommy in Portuguese). I am mostly a mother in Portuguese, thus anything I write about my sons and what they say has to be, of necessity, translated. In addition, my mothering itself involves a lot of translation, and, last but not least, the dissertation I am working on at the moment is about translation.

In spite of all the translating, I should give myself more credit for the English I have already been teaching them all along, words that are often used in the short exchanges we have with people at stores and parks, like “Thank you,” “Please,” “Excuse-me,” and “I’m sorry.” My son has known and used these for years now, and I have noticed that he found an “interesting” purpose for them. When he is eating and starts to give orders to the adults for food or utensils and I ask him to use proper polite works to ask, or when he hits his brother and needs to apologize, he is always reluctant to say what he needs to say and he resists as much as possible. A while back he started to ask to say them in English – somehow he felt it was easier to him to say them this way, I do not know why, perhaps he feels he is yielding less power if he does not say them in Portuguese. So now, even though he still resists politeness once in a while, it is common to have him apologize to his brother with an “I’m sorry,” or when asked to be more polite at the table to say “Please” and “Thank you.” He has also known for years now the question “What’s your name?” and his answer to it, as well as answers to the question: “What’s your brother’s name?” and “How old are you/your brother?” He can also count to twenty and knows the names of the main colors. He does watch Sesame Street once in a while after all!

Lately my husband and I have been taking his interest and the words he already knows as a chance to introduce more words and phrases in English. We ask him “How are you?” and teach him to answer “Fine” or “Good” and to ask the question. I have been re-telling him some parts of Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland as goodnight stories for a while, and last night I taught him how to say the book’s title in English. He still resists when I try to read him books in English, but slowly he is giving in. I guess a good place to start is Dr. Seuss, because it is almost untranslatable and no fun at all without the rhyming, so I have been trying to read him The Cat in the Hat in English, as well as Madeline and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are which is one of his favorite books. I guess it is a good start!

There is a positive side to our monolingualism at home which manifests itself in the boys’ excellent language proficiency and their rich vocabularies. Besides, as I wrote in my blog last year: I am giving them the “gift” of Portuguese, the language of their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. I am sure they will value that someday. I do want, however, to be more proactive and find more ways to motivate their acquisition and/or learning of English. I hope someday my son understands why his mamãe does not talk to him in English and I am looking forward to the day when he becomes fully bilingual. Then, he will identify with me better, and be a “boy/menino in translation” himself.

Lilian W. is a monthly contributing editor and columnist for BBFN. She is a foreign student from Brazil currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation in the humanities. She and her husband speak Portuguese at home with their sons, but she is hoping they will start learning English soon. Check out her family's journey in her One Family One Language column each month. You can learn more about Lilian at her blog.

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