Unprofessional Translation: What Aphasia Tells Us

When something goes wrong, the malfunction may give us an insight into how it goes right. Most of what I know about the workings of our car, I learnt to my cost when it went wrong. Seriously, though, we can learn something about language from people’s inability to speak normally under certain conditions. One such condition is aphasia, inability to produce or understand speech due to brain damage. The damage may have been caused by an external agent of ‘insult’ such as an accident or an operation, or internally by a stroke for example.....next