7 or 6?

Consider the Englsih sentence:
      "This sentence contains at least seven words"
If we wanted to translate this into German then we could say:
       "Dieser Satz enthält mindestens sieben Wörter"
but now a statement that was true in English has become false in German.
Or we could translate it as:
       "Dieser Satz enthält mindestens sechs Wörter" (i.e. "This sentence contains at least six words")
which preserves the truth of the statement but only by translating 7 as 6.

So which is correct? The first translation is literally accurate but at the expense of truth. The second is true but at the expense of accuracy. Which you would use would depend on your purpose.

Sometimes something similar happens with best practice. An attempt may be made to transfer the practice of another organisation point by point to your organisation, based on the idea that we only know it will work in its original form - we don't know what will happen if we modify it. However, the same process that works well in one organisation may fail in another because in the act of "translating" it to a different set of circumstances we have failed to preserve its "truth". So we need to modify it to preserve its truth within the context of our organisation.

Something similar can happen when we attempt to communicate. We can attempt to communicate a consistent message to all of our customers (i.e. use the same form of words) or we can attempt to communicate in a way that ensures each customer receives the same message (i.e. where different words are used to cater for different customer characteristics.)

For instance, in my home state of New South Wales, for people over the age of 18 we have the following breakup by generation:

• 12% Depression/WW2 Generation
• 27% Baby Boomers
• 38% Gen X
• 23% Gen Y

While it may be over-simplifying a little ( different people witin the same generation may respond differently), if we send the same letter to different people, what Boomers may see as professional, Gen Yers may see as patronizing, pompous, pretentious or officious. Alternatively, we could express the same message in different ways targeted to different generations in order to get a similar response from each group.

So we have a choice: we can send a message that is literally consistent or we can send tailored messages that obtain a consistent outcome.

In all of the examples, the difference is between an absolutist perspective in which literal accuracy is a key value and a relativist perspective where context needs to be taken into account. In general, the more nuanced contextual approach will be more effective.

So when you are faced with "translation"-type issues, it may pay to consider wat you want to happen and whether contextual modification is important - sometimes translating "7" as "6" is necessary to preserve the effective essence of a process or communication.