A love story; mediated through translation
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This is a story about the love between a man and a woman who don't know each other's language and haven't learned it either. The man is an American from New Haven, and the woman is a Chinese from Xi'an, China. He speaks English and she speaks Mandarin. They converse through Microsoft Translator.
They met in Xi'an in 2019 when the man went to see the sights (Terracotta warriors, Buddhist temples, and so on). After he came back to America, they continued to communicate through messaging. But then Covid struck and they were cut off from each other. After Covid restrictions were relaxed, she decided to come to America in 2022 on a one-way ticket and stayed here.
The man and the woman have been married for three years and rely on an arsenal of eight external battery packs to keep the energy flowing.
For the technical details, see this long article:
They Are in Love but Don’t Speak the Same Language
He speaks English. She speaks Mandarin. The secret to their happy marriage: Microsoft Translator.
By Kashmir Hill, NYT (2/14/26)
They've known each other for well on seven years. I can't help but think this is a bizarre situation that is unlikely to last in perpetuity. What happens when you're cooperating on a complicated dish in the kitchen, or doing a chore together in the back yard and you left the translator in the house, or you're driving down the road and have to discuss directions. All the more in those romantic, touching, intimate moments when you don't have time to reach for your translator?
One of my high school buddies served in Korea. When he returned to the States, he brought back his new wife. He did not speak any Korean and she did not speak any English. They came to visit my family in Ohio. I remember my Mom trying to help the wife on with her coat in preparation for saying goodbye. It was very awkward.
Selected readings
- "Why electronic machine translation services sometimes seem to fail" (1/29/17)
- "Keep on -inging" (10/30/17)
- "Are you in the book today?" (3/19/20)
- "Speech-to-speech translation" (11/10/12)
[Thanks to François Lang]
François Lang said,
February 17, 2026 @ 3:20 pm
I wish them the best of luck. Omnia vincit amor and all that, but still…
JMGN said,
February 17, 2026 @ 5:49 pm
Regarding the term "mediation" in language learning:
CEFR's Actfour ‘modes of communication’: reception, production, interaction, and mediation. Reception and production focus on personal expression, interaction introduces the co-construction of meaning, and mediation deals with the facilitation of understanding. Each in turn can appear in different ‘semiotic modes’ such as oral, written, or audiovisual.
CEFR's ‘strategic dimension’ consists of ‘learning strategies’ (savoir apprendre) and ‘communication strategies’, but only descriptors for some of the latter are provided. Therefore, literature needs be drawn from elsewhere to fill the gaps .
See further about the Action-oriented approach: https://zaguan.unizar.es/record/152447
Barbara Phillips Long said,
February 17, 2026 @ 7:28 pm
Based on what the NYT story tells us, this couple spends a lot more time physically touching each other — in order to share the phone — than many other couples do. That may well help them sustain their relationship. They are also trying to learn each other’s languages, even though the learning is challenging for them. My preference for happily-ever-afters makes me want to believe that they will keep working through their issues. It sounds like they may well develop or have already developed a lot of nonverbal cues.
Increasingly, perhaps influenced by well over a decade of widowhood, my perspective is to avoid measuring other relationships by the norms I set for myself for many years. Happy couples exist despite many different family configurations and lifestyles, such as coping with cultural differences, or a deaf partner, or living together apart, or disabilities, or even dementia. There are also lots of ways couples fail to communicate. One nasty tactic the couple in the Times story doesn’t use? The silent treatment.
JPL said,
February 17, 2026 @ 8:31 pm
I agree with Barbara: I'm sure this marriage will stand the test of time. One other pitfall they can avoid: saying mean things to one another that they later regret. (They should both try to avoid learning the mean things in the respective languages.)
VVOV said,
February 17, 2026 @ 8:49 pm
I know a couple whose relationship started similarly (no common language, met via a dating app using machine translation and then continued to communicate after meeting in-person via machine translation on their phones). They are still together 6 years later, but have been more successful at learning each other‘s languages than the couple in the article and I believe stopped using machine translation after about one year.
Peter Cyrus said,
February 18, 2026 @ 3:33 am
My dad was a physician, and was treating an elderly Chinese patient for pneumonia. But he couldn't ask the man how his lungs felt, because he spoke no English. One day the man's wife showed up, and spoke English, so my dad asked her to ask her husband how his lungs felt. She asked him … in English! It turned out they'd been married over 50 years with no common language! My recently-divorced dad commented that that must be the secret.
Victor Mair said,
February 18, 2026 @ 5:17 am
What unusual, and enlightening, aspects of human relationships this post is eliciting!
Philip Taylor said,
February 18, 2026 @ 5:57 am
I join with others in sincerely wishing them a very long and happy life together, no matter what the obstacles thereto.
VMartin said,
February 18, 2026 @ 6:53 am
Nikolay Marr, who dominated Soviet linguistics for decades, was the son of a Scotsman and a young Georgian girl, who didn't understand each other at all. It is said that there was some 60 years age difference between his parents. Yet young Marr was a talented boy who later knew some 20 languages. As a staunch opponent of Indo-Europeanism, he also emphasized the role of sign language, which he considered the primordial language of humanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Marr
JimG said,
February 18, 2026 @ 8:37 am
The translators' weaknesses are worsened by fragmentary utterances and informality. Full, complete sentences improve the translators' accuracy.
Word choice errors I've seen very recently are knows/nose, weak/week, where/ware/wear, ours /hours..
Combine more than a couple of those in a sentence gives gobbledygook.
Julian said,
February 18, 2026 @ 9:05 pm
@barbara Phillips Long
Charles Darwin's wife was pretty religious.
Charles, not so much.
They worked things out.
In my biography of Darwin, if I recall correctly, there is a touching image of Charles on Sunday morning patiently waiting at the lych gate while Emma was in the church.
KevinM said,
February 19, 2026 @ 11:36 am
I was present at an initial appearance in court for an arrestee who spoke only Urdu. Because he would obviously be released on bail, the magistrate granted his wife's irregular request to translate. The advice-of-rights went like this:
Magistrate: You have the right to remain silent.
Wife: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT, HONEY!!!
Magistrate: Wait. Does he understand English?
Wife: He understands me, your Honor.
번하드 said,
February 20, 2026 @ 12:40 pm
I also wish the two the best of luck on their way together, love is strong.
I fondly remember a pianist from Korea who got married to a chef from Germany,
to their great fortune both happen to speak French!
Tom said,
February 20, 2026 @ 7:29 pm
"trying to help the wife on with her coat"
Tom said,
February 20, 2026 @ 7:31 pm
"trying to help the wife on with her coat"
This deserves its own post. Not meant as a criticism. I think I would say the same, but how strange.
Philip Taylor said,
February 21, 2026 @ 9:31 am
"the wife" — analogous, I would suggest to French (e.g.,) les yeux where we (English speakers) would say "my eyes". "The wife", is, however, quite idiomatic in British English, possibly because the speaker is mentally elevating his wife to the position of the wife, all other wives merely being a wife.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
February 21, 2026 @ 10:38 am
“The wife” doesn’t strike me as odd. It isn’t a construction I use, but I have heard it used. My take is that it is linked to lower socioeconomic class status. Nowadays, I think it may also be linked to misogyny that is widely and deeply imbedded in the U.S. It’s less personal than using her name or her relationship (such as “mother” or “grandma,” which are not preceded by “the.”)
The “on with her coat” phrase sounds vaguely familiar to me, but I would probably say “trying to help his wife put on her coat.” I do use other phrases that begin with “on with,” such as “I need to get on with my day.” And I would not say “help his wife off with her coat.” (Why am I reminded now of “off with her head”?)
If an adult said to a child, “Off with your coat and then you can come have your snack,” the “off with your coat” would sound normal to me in that context as an alternative to “take off your coat.” So, commands like “on with your coat” or “off with your coat” work for me, but they don’t seem parallel grammatically to the “on with” in “trying to help his wife on with her coat.”
The grammatical role of the coat in “off with your coat” is different than “[you] take off your coat,” but my junior high sentence diagrams are unlikely to capture all the nuances that grammatical theory now offers. Back then, I would have said the coat is first a subject, then an object. I have the feeling that there is more happening in those phrases than that.