Lost in Translation

Here's my biggest secret: I sometimes can’t pronounce my own name.

Four letters and two syllables, yet my name presents infinite quandaries of inflection, unslanted vowels, and cross-continental conundrums. I’ve got the Magic 8-Ball of ethnic names: Shake me up, and you get a different answer every time. The truth is, I’m not always sure myself.

Growing up Middle Eastern in Canada, I’ve always felt like a part of me was lost in translation. My name, so beautiful in my parents’ native Turkish, doesn’t quite fit my flattened Canadian accent. For the longest time, I couldn’t shake off the weight of my four scarlet letters, making me incurably, inescapably different.

And so I did what I had to do. I made up a Starbucks alias and practiced my “where are you from” answer to perfection. I adjusted my autocorrect to avoid signing off emails as “Rain” or, God forbid, “Rat.” I stopped speaking in Turkish and adopted toothpick Canadian pronunciations. It was a pretty foolproof strategy, in my opinion ― at least, until sixth-grade homeroom.

I think that intuitively, every hyphen-Canadian dreads roll call. I suspect that my teachers dread it too. When they get to my name, they usually freeze, and the smiles fade off their faces. Then they do one of three things. Some teachers retreat immediately, keeping their honor intact. “I’m going to butcher this,” they say apologetically. “Can the person spelled R-A-N-A raise their hand?” Others stoically march onwards. “Ray―” they begin valiantly. “Rae― Rane―.” I usually rescue them at this point, for the sake of both of us. “Raa-naa,” I say, after consulting the Magic 8-Ball. And the last type stares at my name and bends space and time to transform it into the name they want it to be. “Raehna,” they announce confidently. “Raena.”

One day during class, a classmate with an equally unpronounceable name asked me, “So how do you say your name?” that I blanked. I had always accepted the different variations of my name from teachers and friends alike that I forgot its true phonetics. I was just Rana Tekin, trapped by teachers, baristas and autocorrect programs alike ― and myself.

I wasn’t just choosing to compress myself within four lengthy letters, or to get mired down by mispronunciations. I was refusing to embrace the vastness beyond my own name, the thousands of years of language and culture and humanity and belonging that were jam-packed like suitcases into my big bold name. And that’s when I made the momentous, life-changing decision to learn my name, the way it was intended: in Turkish.

When I was 10, I started with the Turkish alphabet. My parents taught me the vowels first, and then we moved on to consonants. Spelling rules and grammar tools and a thousand other things in between, until slowly, painstakingly, I could pronounce my own name. Once I’d graduated from words, I moved on to sentences. Then nursery rhymes, then poetry, and even stories. As I learned how to read, I realized that I was also learning how to reclaim the name that had never truly fit. Just like I could hard-wire my brain to read in two languages, I could train myself to flourish in two countries. Two cultures. Two identities.

Ultimately, learning to pronounce my own name was about more than just memorizing syllables: It was about learning to carve out a home for myself in the space between worlds. It was about bridging a cultural gap without doing the splits. It was about reforging and rekindling myself in the myriad ways of a language I barely understood, but loved nonetheless.

Today, I still get a little shy before I introduce my name. But now, I ️understand that I’m not Turkish or Canadian, but both. I might be a product of my ancestors, but I am also the speaker of my own name and shaper of my own future ― down to the last letter.