Making Meaning from a Second Language

Trying to read a newspaper article in Portuguese was extremely challenging.  I was able to get the gist of the main idea from a few words, but certainly did not understand any of the details as I could not translate any of the sentences.  So what helped me was first of all noticing the photograph that accompanied the article, which was of broken ice floating on a river.  The caption read ‘Rio Chicago’ which is easy to translate into the Chicago River.  The title, ‘Homem morreu’, had two words that I used my knowledge of French to help translate, because I know homme is French for man and mort is French for dead.  So the title must begin with ‘man dead’ or ‘man died’.  In language, many words have an origin in either Latin or Greek, so there may be similarities with a first language and a second language, or as I did, I used a second language to help with the third language.  There were also cognates (words similar in both languages in L1 and L2), such as Americano (American), reportou (reported), hospitalizado (hospital).  I recognized the words ‘rio’ and ‘amigos’ because I knew them in Spanish.  If I knew enough nouns and verbs in one sentence, I would be able to use my knowledge of grammar to piece together the information, but my lack of knowledge of these nouns and verbs, which carry the bulk of the information, meant that I couldn’t build this meaning.  Having said that, grammar rules differ between some languages, so it becomes difficult to always make an accurate translation.  The most words that I could confidently translate were: ‘Um americano do Minnesota morreu’.  To get more meaning from the article I would have to use either an English/Portuguese dictionary or use a translation program for those key words that hold the meaning.  So I went to translate.google.com and it was simple to type in the Portuguese and the English translation was instantly provided.  It translates whole sentences.  So the rest of the headline read ‘when trying to take the mobile phone.’ So from there I guess that a man died in the Chicago River because he was trying to get his mobile phone?  By not being a native speaker there may often be some element of misinterpretation when trying to make a translation.  You have to use some guess work and your background knowledge to find the overall meaning.