The three primary colors are yellow, red, and blue. All other colors come from those. You can certainly paint a picture using just those three colors without mixing them, but if you want to really make the picture come to life, you have to mix the colors. Yellow and blue to get green for the leaves and the grass. Red and yellow to get orange for the fruit in the tree. Red and blue to get purple for flowers around the base of the tree. All three could make brown for the tree trunk. You'll add more or less of one or the other of the colors to get variety. Maybe you'll use black and white to lighten or darken your colors.
That's kind of how language works. Or at least translating so that communication happens. All the languages I know about have idioms. These are phrases that we use regularly that don't necessarily make sense unless you know what they represent. For example: over my dead body. What?! You mean I have to kill you in order to change the channel? No. I just really don't want you to change the channel. So a non-native English speaker is going to be confused by this phrase.
I am learning Indonesian right now. "Apa kabar" means "how are you." But it literally translates "what news." If I asked you what's the news, you would probably tell me about flooding in Missouri, tornadoes in Texas, or earthquakes in India. You probably wouldn't tell me you are doing well. The phrase makes sense to some degree, especially when you know that a common response is "kabar baik:" news good. But unless you know this is the Indonesian way of asking how things are going, you would be lost when you saw the literal translation. It's kind of like our question: "What's up?" where the expected response is something along the lines of: "Not much."
Someone who translates knows that the literal translation doesn't always make sense to a non-native speaker, so they look for ways to bridge the gap. They paint a picture using words in order to convey what the other person is saying and usually that picture is made by artfully combining cultures. To really translate well, a translator needs to be well versed in both languages and the best translator has a good grasp of both cultures because some things don't make sense unless you understand the culture behind it.
I would say that a big part of my job as a foster care worker was being a translator. My book shelves are filled with books on psychology, court room procedure, drugs, homeland security, and criminal investigation. Almost half my life has been spent in learning to speak in these contexts and to translate between contexts. I have translated between foster parents, mental health professionals, attorneys, judges, teenagers, and parents in the abuse/neglect system. They each have their own language and they do not understand each other without someone translating between them. Some speak to certain groups better than others. But I was the hub. I had to paint the picture; sometimes that meant going back to the drawing board and coming up with a new way to express what I was trying to convey.
Now as I get ready to go back to school in less than a week, I recognize that I am having to relearn a completely new way to communicate. I am dealing now with people that have no frame of reference for understanding what I did in my work. They have questions; I want to let them in. But I don't yet know how to communicate to them the confusing, often muddled world of child welfare. Most of them have had no contact with the legal system or with abuse/neglect or with mental health professionals or with drugs. That's a good thing, by the way. But it does make it complicated to try to explain what I am thinking about.
I usually lapse back into jargon when I talk about the things I have been processing. That is how I have talked about them for as long as they have been a part of my life. And I am not yet well versed enough in civilian to know how to talk about them other than the languages I speak fluently, those of my former profession. So much as I am intellectually and spiritually ready to go back to school, I am a bit concerned emotionally how this is going to go. I know there are things I will be dealing with that my loving fellow students will want to be supportive in, but I still question whether I will be capable of talking to them about it.
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