Radical translation

Radical translation is like playing a game where you have to understand what someone else is saying in a language you don't know. Let's say you speak English, and your friend speaks Spanish. You want to know what they're saying so you can be friends and play games together. But you don't know any Spanish words!

So, to play the game of radical translation, you need to find a way to understand what your friend is saying without knowing any Spanish. One way to do this is to watch your friend and see what they're pointing at when they say different words. For example, your friend might say "esta pelota" (pronounced "es-ta peh-lo-ta"), and you can see they're pointing at a ball. So, now you know that "pelota" means "ball" in Spanish.

You can keep playing this game and adding more and more words to your vocabulary until you can understand what your friend is saying in Spanish without needing to see what they're pointing at. This is radical translation! It's a way to learn a new language by figuring out the meanings of words from context and observation.

In real life, radical translation is used by anthropologists and linguists to study how different cultures communicate with each other. It helps us understand how language affects the way people think and act, and how meaning is constructed across different languages and cultures.