Perhaps most importantly, we spent a lot of time on language and translation. I had been to many meetings where a good part of what was said was mistranslated and 100 percent of the nuance was lost. Burmese is a wonderful language for telling stories and expressing human feelings and experiences, but it is not very good for expressing policy ideas. Many words related to government are neologisms. “Human rights” is translated as lu-akwint-ye, where the word for “right” is the same as the word for “license” or “opportunity”;
