questions for "you are what you speak"

 1. In the article, Deutscher described how some languages assign gender too inanimate objects, therefore changing the speaker's perception of the object. While Japanese doesn't assign gender to inanimate objects, the distinction between male and female pronouns are significantly more pronounced than in English. Such pronounced distinctions often does not exist in English, therefore most native English speakers don't even have a concept of it, and the distinction is often lost in translation. How do you as a translator counter this? In other words, how would you describe the color red to a blind person who don't have the concept of color?

2. Deutscher described how the concept of colors might be distorted depending on the language. In Japanese, the word for blue and green - あおい and みどりare often used interchangeably to describe a color that is somewhere between blue and green. Have you ever encountered a situation where the difference in concept of colors became a problem? And in your mind, is あおい blue and みどり green, or the other way around?