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Dear reader,

Words change across years and generations. They change spelling, sound, and especially meaning. But some follow such long and winding paths, so full of surprises, it can be incredible. One of these is the English word “freak.”

Circus poster photo, Ala., Walker Evans [1935] [AmMemory LOC id- fsa1998017988(slash)PP]

A key association of “freak” is with the circus, where it meant a person displayed due to some unusual (even hideous) characteristic such as extreme height, extra fingers, etc. This photo of a circus poster was taken in Alabama in 1935 by Walker Evans. (Source: Library of Congress, American Memory website)

Brave, fierce warrior. From Old English, this sense dates to A.D. 900 or before.

Sudden fancy, whim. This use was well established by the early 19th century. “A sudden freak seemed to have seized him” (Jane Austen). Spanish equivalents: capricho, locura. Not much used anymore. But freak out is—meaning a highly nervous or irrational reaction to a situation: “I need you to stay calm—don’t freak out on me.”

Enthusiast. From the sense of “whim” arose that of “enthusiast.” It’s still common to hear, “She’s a health freak.” Spanish: Es una maniática de la salud.

Abnormal or extreme specimen. From “whim” came, too, the idea of the abnormal. A very tall person could be called “a freak” or “a freak of nature.” Around 1920 the term “circus freak” began to grow in use. It referred to an unfortunate person or animal fated to be exhibited in a circus, fair, or carnival. Spanish has fenómeno del circo. Typical attractions might be “The Bearded Lady” or “The Two-Headed Calf.”

Unusual, odd, rare. Similar to the previous sense, but distinct, is this broader one: as an adjective, “freak” can simply mean “unusual, odd, rare.” For instance, “a freak early-summer snowstorm” or “a freak occurrence.”

Drug user. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was commonplace to hear “freak” for an enthusiastic drug user, usually of marijuana or LSD. It was also associated, in men, with beards and long hair. The combination “hippie freak” was common. An underground comic of the era was The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

Nymphomaniac, hypersexual person. The drug-related sense began to give way to a new one. Rick James used it when he famously sang, “Super freak, the girl’s a super freak!” The meaning is that an individual is presumably insatiable in the sexual realm. Spanish has ninfómana and many slang terms, including loca (the feminine form of the adjective for “crazy”), much used in Argentina and Uruguay.

Copyright ©2016 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in the May 8-14, 2016 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as number 179 in the weekly bilingual column, “Misterios y Engimas de la Traducción/Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, Engl>Span; a Tennessee State Courts Certified Interpreter, Engl<>Span; and an innovative trainer in the fields of translation, interpreting, and intercultural competency, with over 25 years experience. He holds the doctorate in Latin American History from The Johns Hopkins University, and is a Juris Doctor Candidate at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, University of Memphis (May 2017).

2016-07-05 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Of masks, minds, sinners, and the word “person”

Enlace para español/Click here for Spanish

Dear reader,

What is it you and I, and everyone we know, are all examples of? So many words for it: “individuals,” “human beings,” just plain “humans,” “persons,” to name just a few. These are plurals; in the singular, each of us is an “individual,” a “human being,” or simply a “human,” or a “person.” That last word may be the most common of all. persona máscara classic mask

“Person” has an interesting history: it comes from Latin persona, with a root sense of “to sound through”—the reference is to an actor’s mask, possibly with some means of voice amplification, as with a horn. Persona, then, came to mean “role” or “character,” gradually acquiring the further sense of “person, individual.” Engl. “persona” (with the “a” hanging on at the end just like in Latin) still means an assumed role or personality.

Persona’s descendants are found throughout the Romance languages (Sp.. It. persona, Fr. personne which can also mean “nobody,” Port. pessoa, etc.), but also Ger. Person, Swed. person, and many others.

The Slavic languages use a wholly different word: Rus. chelovek (pronounced “chel-a-VYEK”) appears to derive from words for “mind, thought” and “time, eternity”—thus the word for “person” would mean something like “eternal mind,” a lovely and spiritual sense Plato no doubt would have savored. (Engl. “man” seems, likewise, cognate with “mind” and originally meant any human being.)

Depending on the context, a whole series of terms can be more or less equivalent to “person”: “citizen,” “subject”, “taxpayer,” “voter,” “resident,” and “consumer,” to name just a few. Of course their connotations differ pretty dramatically. There is an assertion of rights implicit in “citizen” that’s not quite there in “consumer,” though the latter has legal rights too.

Then there is “souls” with all its mystery and sometimes pathos—think of a phrase like “the 1,517 souls that perished on the R.M.S. Titanic.”

A curious and fascinating word for “person” is pikadur in Guinea-Bissau Crioulo, a tongue with a strong Portuguese core plus West African elements. Pikadur is from Port. pecador (sinner). Pecado (sin) is related to the second syllable in “impeach” which originally meant “to find fault, to find sin.” In this word for “person,” the hand of the Christian missionary is not hard to see!

Theology meets language: in Crioulo you may mean “person” but you’re saying “sinner”!

¡Buenas palabras! Good words!

Pablo

Copyright ©2016 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in the Jul. 8-14, 2016 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as number 188 in the weekly bilingual column, “Misterios y Engimas de la Traducción/Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, Engl>Span; a Tennessee State Courts Certified Interpreter, Engl<>Span; and an innovative trainer in the fields of translation, interpreting, and intercultural competency, with over 25 years experience. He holds the doctorate in Latin American History from The Johns Hopkins University, and is a Juris Doctor Candidate at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, University of Memphis (May 2017).

2016-03-26 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Lunary language and lore

Enlace para español/Link for Spanish

Dear reader,

This past week brought not only a full moon (Span. luna llena, or, in a graceful Latin form, plenilunio), but also a penumbral lunar eclipse. And as far removed as most of us city folk are from the country and the spell the night sky used to cast on humanity, our companion orb has not lost the power to stun us with its beauty.

Human language testifies to the profound imprint that Earth’s satellite has made on human consciousness. We’ll look very briefly at some of that testimony, mainly in English and Spanish.

penumbral lunar eclipse march 2016 The odd chance that Sun (Sol) and Moon (Luna) appear the same size in the earthly sky, has surely reinforced human cultures’ seeing them as a pair representing male/female, gold/silver, night/day. The moon-female tie runs deep: the lunar phases find an echo in woman’s menstrual cycle.

The moon has its day: Engl. “Monday” (Ger. Montag, Dan. mandag), Span. lunes (Fr. lundi, It. lunedì). It also gives us “month”; Span. mes is from Lat. mensis, a root visible in words like “bi-mensual.”

Another link: moon and madness, yields Engl. “lunatic” and Span. Lunático. But English informalizes it with “looney” and “looney tunes” (from the old cartoon series); “looney bin” is a mental hospital.

English also uses “moon” for “to languish sadly” (as one pining for a lost or unrequited love), which is a slightly archaic usage, and “to show one’s bared buttocks,” which isn’t.

Sp. lunar (loo-NAR) is also “birthmark,” once thought caused by the Moon’s influence, or “polka dot” on clothing. Spanish calls a landing on the Moon an alunizaje (by analogy to aterrizaje on Earth).

“Moonlight” (Sp. claro de luna, Fr. claire de lune) has a power over young lovers, long understood (and abetted) by poets and songwriters.

Samuel Johnson’s Sermon XII movingly uses the lovely, archaic word “sublunary” for “earthly”—urging his listeners “to bid farewell to sublunary vanities” and instead “with pure heart and steady faith to ‘fear God and keep his commandments.’”

¡Buenas palabras! Good words!

Pablo

An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in the Nov. 27-Dec. 3, 2015 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as number 158 in the weekly bilingual column, “Misterios y Engimas de la Traducción/Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (Aamerican Translators Association) Certified Translator, Engl>Span; a Tennessee State Courts Certified Interpreter, Engl<>Span; and an innovative trainer in the fields of translation, interpreting, and intercultural competency, with over 25 years experience. He holds the doctorate in Latin American History from The Johns Hopkins University, and is a Juris Doctor Candidate at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, University of Memphis (May 2017).

2013-12-30 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Happy New Year, Feliz Año Nuevo…!

Click here for Spanish/Enlace para español

Dear reader,

This is the greeting of the moment, which in Spanish can be expressed several ways: “¡Feliz Año Nuevo!” (Happy New Year), “¡Feliz Año!” (Happy Year), or “¡Próspero Año Nuevo!” (Prosperous New Year).

New Year’s Eve is la Nochevieja in Spanish: literally ‘the old night’.

January (Spanish enero, not capitalized) is named for Janus, the Roman god of doorways, who had one face looking backwards and another forward. As most of us do at this time of year: New Year’s resolutions (Spanish resoluciones de año nuevo) appear to date back to Roman times. Breaking them is likely just as old.

The year hasn’t always started in January. Among other dates, that honor fell for many centuries to March 25, in the early springtime of the Northern Hemisphere. January 1 replaced it when the Gregorian calendar was adopted (in 1582 in Catholic countries, later elsewhere, including 1752 in England).

For dates from Jan. 1 through Mar. 24 of the years around the time of the changeover, one often sees O.S. (Old Style) or N.S. (New Style) following the date, meant as a clarification: in the Old Style, the year changed not on Jan. 1 but on Mar. 25. So, for instance, Mar. 14, 1753 O.S. would be Mar. 14, 1754 N.S.

In the French Republican calendar, after the Revolution, the year started on our Sep. 22.

The fiscal year, depending on the country, begins the first of January, April, July, or October. The school year starts in March in the Southern Hemisphere, traditionally in September in the North (though now, schoolchildren glumly face an ever earlier start, as early as the first week of August!).

Other New Years are not fixed: this year the Jewish New Year will be Sep. 24-26; the Islamic, Oct. 24-25; and the Chinese, Jan. 31.

Even birthdays can be considered, and many people do think of them this way, as the beginning of a personal new year.

In truth, every year brings many New Years. May each and every one of them, in the course of 2014, bring health and prosperity, dear reader, to you and yours.

¡Buenas palabras… Good words!

Pablo

Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT, is an ATA Certified Translator (Engl>Span) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter (Engl<>Span). An earlier version of this essay was originally published in the Dec. 30, 2013-Jan. 5, 2014 edition of La Prensa Latina, Memphis, Tennessee, as part of the weekly bilingual column “Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation”/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.

2013-11-01 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Is Día de Muertos/Day of the Dead a ‘Mexican Halloween’?

by Pablo J. Davis

We’re in the brief interval between Halloween, widely celebrated in the US, and the festival known as ‘Día de los Muertos’ or ‘Día de Muertos’ and associated primarily with Mexico, though it’s observed in different ways throughout most of Latin America. It’s a good time to think about cultural similarities and differences.

La Calavera de la Catrina, the brilliant creation of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, has been the icon of El Día de Muertos for a century now.

Many in the US think of the ‘Día de Muertos’ (Day of the Dead) as the ‘Mexican Halloween’. But is it really so? Does the one ‘translate’ to the other? Just as the Spanish word ‘amigo’ (or ‘amiga’) and English ‘friend’ may be side-by-side in bilingual dictionaries, yet tend to mean quite different things to the people using them – and the same can be said for familia/family, fiesta/party, and countless other culturally significant word pairs – so Halloween and Día de los Muertos may share certain symbols, and the time of year, but are markedly different phenomena.

The (often unsuspected) differences between what many people think of as equivalent holidays is not quite what is meant by the term ’false friends’. The latter term refers to words that appear to the foreign speaker to mean one thing, due to their similarity with a familiar word in her language, but that in fact mean something different. An English speaker, on reading in Spanish that ‘Gómez sufrió repetidas injurias a manos de Pérez’, may imagine that Pérez repeatedly assaulted Gómez, causing him physical injuries; when in fact, Spanish ‘injuria’ means insults, lies, slander, and other sorts of verbal attacks. False friends can be tricky, but ultimately are fairly easily caught and corrected by speakers with good mastery of both languages.

Not so cultural phenomena. There the differences are more subtle, may not even be captured by the bilingual dictionary. Most English speakers, for instance, more readily use ‘friend’ where a Spanish speaker tends to use ‘compañero’ or ‘colega’, reserving ‘amigo’ or ‘amiga’ for a closer relationship. In other words, ‘amigo/amiga’ is a harder title to earn – we can think of it as perhaps socially more ’expensive’ – than is ‘friend’. No criticism of either culture meant here: it’s simply a cultural difference, an important one that can cause hurt and misunderstanding when not perceived by one side or the other.

What does all this mean for Halloween and the Día de los Muertos? These two holidays, seemingly close equivalents if not downright interchangeable, map very differently onto the two cultures. Halloween is largely about defying and even mocking death, about neutralizing its terrors by rendering them theatrical. There is a kind of daring play involved, a dancing around the macabre.

In Mexican (and, more broadly, Latin American) culture, el Día de los Muertos is something else entirely. One celebrates, remembers, honors, one’s deceased loved ones – parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles – it’s common to hear people speak of ‘mi muertito’ or ‘mi muertita’ (my beloved dead one) for a deceased father or grandmother, spouse or sibling. Ancient, pre-Columbian and pre-Christian traditions of ancestor worship and love were intertwined, over the colonial decades and centuries that unfolded after Contact and Conquest, with the Christian calendar and rites to create something new: scholars of religious history and culture refer to ‘syncretic’ religious practices. Thus the celebration of the Día de los Muertos came to coincide with All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, on the Christian calendar.

The ramifications of ritual involved in this festivity are elaborate and complex. The baking of cakes in the form of skulls and skeletons, the making of skeletal figurines often fully dressed and adorned with hats and other accessories, the fashioning of altars bearing photographs of beloved dead and containing offerings to them, the creation of satiric verses, and a rich graphic tradition of death-related iconography (most famously in the work of José Guadalupe Posada, whose ‘La Catrina’ is above left) are just some of the flowerings of festive practice that the Día de los Muertos has given rise to.

Though there are some cultural-religious practices elsewhere in Latin America that have some commonalities with El Día de los Muertos – for instance, the cult of ‘San La Muerte’ (Saint Death) in the Guaraní cultural zone of northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay, deeply rooted in the populace but rejected by the Catholic Church as pagan practice – there is nothing quite like the centrality of El Día de los Muertos in Mexican culture.

Still, wholeness and acceptance in the face of mortality, and the imperative of sustaining connection with loved ones no longer living – the heart of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos – form a thread that runs through much of Latin America’s cultural map. Argentina’s Atahualpa Yupanqui (1908-1992) expressed this idea as beautifully as anyone ever has. Half a century ago, in his memorable anthem, ‘Los hermanos’, the singer, guitarist, composer, and folklorist wrote:

Yo tengo tantos hermanos     I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar.        that I can’t count them all.
En el valle, la montaña,          In the valleys, in the mountains,
en la pampa y en el mar.        On the pampas and at sea.

Cada cual con sus trabajos,    Each one with his work,
con sus sueños, cada cual.      with her dreams, each one.
Con la esperanza adelante,     With hope before them
con los recuerdos detrás.         And memories behind

. . .

Y así, seguimos andando                 And so we go on,
curtidos de soledad.                         Hardened by loneliness
Y en nosotros nuestros muertos    And inside us, we carry our dead
pa que nadie quede atrás.              So that no one is left behind

Yo tengo tantos hermanos I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar . . . that I cannot count them all . . .

In the end, interpreting cultural phenomena across languages challenges us to a subtlety of understanding even beyond what translation usually demands. Things that look the same can be fundamentally different.

Copyright ©2011-2013 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.
This essay originally appeared at http://interfluency.wordpress.com in October 2011. It is being republished this year with an accompanying Spanish translation.

2013-06-02 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Summer, its names and romance

Dear reader,

The calendar tells us that the Northern Hemisphere summer is still a few weeks away. A few moments outdoors confirm that the season is already here. Let’s spend a minute with its names in English and Spanish.

“Summer romance” (amores de verano, in Spanish), a phrase that brings a sigh to many lips.

“Summer” is Germanic in origin (Old Saxon sumar)… One of the oldest extant texts in English is the poetic hymn to the season, ”Sumer is icumen in” (Summer is here), from 13th century Middle English.

Spanish verano, unsurprisingly, comes from Latinveranum; what’s unexpected to modern eyes and ears, though, is that veranum could mean either spring or summer. These seasons, which we differentiate, were historically blurred together—as were their names. Indeed, Spanish primavera, for spring, used to mean “early summer”.

English speakers turn “summer” into a verb and speak of “summering in Maine”; in Spanish, the noun has to be retrofitted to make veranear: Antes veraneábamos en la sierra (We used to summer in the mountains).

(By the way, let’s clear up a lingering doubt: the seasons are not capitalized in English unless part of a proper name such as “Summer Olympics”, “Fall Semester”.)

Kids go to “summer camp”, which in Spanish can be called either la colonia de verano or, much like the English, el campamento de verano.

Spanish has another word for summer, almost unused except in literary contexts: el estío (from Latin aestivum), a relative of French été. The same root is present in “to estivate” or “estivation” (the latter a hot-weather equivalent of hibernation).

Finally, dear reader, there must be a “summer romance” that you can recall with a sigh. Curiously, this phrase, the same as its Spanish equivalent, amores de verano, was little used before the 1960s.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright © 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the June 9-15, 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the regular bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (inglés>español) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter (inglés<>español) who also provides custom-designed cultural/linguistic coaching and training.

2013-05-29 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

CIA and “SEE-ya”: Adventures in translating abbreviations

Dear reader,

The name of the agency is abbreviated, in English, as an initialism (each letter pronounced separately, “C-I-A”). In Spanish, the initialism is transformed into a true acronym, pronounced as if it were a word: “SEE-ya”.

In an earlier column, we observed how abbreviations made up of initial letters (sometimes, initial syllables), can be divided into two subtypes: (i) acronyms like PIN or RAM, which are pronounced like words, and (ii) initialisms like ATM or NGO, pronounced letter-by-letter. These abbreviations present many curiosities and challenges to the translator. Here are just a few examples…

Where English uses the initialism “UN” for the United Nations, Spanish has“ONU” (pronounced “OH-new”), for Organización de las Naciones Unidas.
The birth of “laser” as an acronym for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” was long forgotten in English by the time Spanish officially adopted láser. Likewise for “radar”, “scuba”, and “MIDI”.
“CIA”, a famous initialism, is different. The agency’s name has an official Spanish translation: Agencia Central de Inteligencia, but the Spanish abbreviation, oddly, is not “ACI”. Rather, Spanish long ago imported the initialism directly and made it an acronym: CIA (pronounced “SEE-yah”). An additional oddity is that the acronym is occasionally spelled Cía, which, with a period following, happens to be the Spanish abbreviation forCompañía (Company)—and “The Company” is a fairly well-known nickname for that agency.
Yet another situation is that of “compact disc”. This term has an accepted Spanish translation, disco compacto. As with “CIA”, though, the abbreviation is not “DC” (as you might expect) but “CD”, straight from English. Until about a decade ago, this was usually pronounced “seh-DEH” in the Hispanic world; but, more and more, Spanish speakers use English phonetics to say it: “see-DEE”.

Much agility is needed to translate and interpret these terms. The circumstances of their birth are diverse—and so are the paths they take from one language to another.

¡Buenas palabras!
Pablo

Copyright © 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the 12-18 May 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the regular bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (inglés>español) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter (inglés<>español) who also provides custom-designed cultural/linguistic coaching and training.

2013-04-15 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

After the meal, the lovely (and untranslatable?) ‘sobremesa’

Dear reader,

Imagine a tasty and pleasant meal shared with friends, or at a family reunion. Dessert is finished. Now comes coffee, or perhaps cordials… maybe some other confection… and more coffee… And all the while, the conversation rolls on, the stories, the jokes.

Spanish has a term for it: la sobremesa, when the talk and the laughter are just more food and drink.

After the meal, that long session of coffee, or tea, or wine, or dessert, or a combination of these… but conversation as the main dish. It’s the ‘sobremesa’ so important in Spanish/Latin American culture… and virtually untranslatable into English.

How to translate this lovely, expressive word into English?

That’s quite a puzzle, because sobremesa simply has no exact equivalent in English—not even a fairly close one.

The attempts at translation we’ve seen (“table talk,” “after-dinner conversation,” and “sitting on after a meal,” among others) describe it, barely. And, really, la sobremesa is more than any of those things!

But, phrases like these may be the best we have. Sometimes that’s how we translate, by describing, even if the result is inexact and clumsy.

At other times, the foreign word is used directly. It typically happens when the translator has the need, or luxury, of emphasizing how different the other culture is: this is the case of many novels and anthropological accounts.

It’s an intriguing question, why one language lacks a word for something another names. Clearly, English speakers have “sobremesas,” though likely less frequent and less lengthy. Our sense is that it doesn’t quite have enough importance, in this culture, to have “rated” being given a name.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

2013-02-04 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Did you see the Cuervos win Super Tazón XLVII?

Dear reader,

For the Spanish-speaking world, the game in which the champion of a league or tournament is decided is known as la final.

In the United States, where P.R. is an art and a science, baseball since 1901 has had its “World Series”, a somewhat immodest name.

And for nearly a half-century now, the NFL’s final game has been known as the Super Bowl. Further marketing brilliance: numbering them with roman numerals: last Sunday’s edition was Super Bowl XLVII… letters that announce an event of historical, or imperial, dimensions.

“Bowl” originally meant just a stadium (first, apparently, was Yale’s), due to the hemispheric, amphitheater shape.

Beginning in 1923, the term names a championship game, the Rose Bowl. The Sugar Bowl and Cotton Bowl followed, and dozens more; and in the ‘60s, the NFL’s Super Bowl. (Curiously, the first two Super Bowls, in which the Green Bay Packers defeated first the Kansas City Chiefs and then the Oakland Raiders, were not called by that name; the term “Super Bowl,” and the corresponding roman numerals, were applied retroactively in 1969, the year the New York Jets shocked the sports world by defeating the mighty and heavily-favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.)

Spanish-language contact with American football is recent; only in the ‘80s did Super Tazón come into use: tazón,augmentative of taza (cup), refers to a deep plate or bowl. But Super Tazón is not nearly as widely used in Spanish as the direct calque from English, “Super Bowl”, with its prestige and powerful connotations.

Both Super Bowl teams’ names have a Hispanic connection: the Ravens (Cuervos), allusion to Edgar Allan Poe, who deeply influenced Spanish American literature, and the Forty-Niners (almost never translated into Spanish), reference to the Gold Rush that descended on California after Guadalupe Hidalgo, the treaty that ended the US-Mexican War.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the Feb. 10-16 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column “Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción/Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (English>Spanish) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Court Interpreter for Spanish and English.

2013-01-05 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Educación: education and upbringing

Dear reader,

Last week, we saw how the English expression “Congratulations!” is separated by Spanish into “Felicitaciones!” for a success vs. “¡Felicidades!” on life passages (marriage, birth of a child, New Year).

Similarly, Spanish ser and estar distinguish essence (Es mi hija, She is my daughter) from state (Está ansiosa por algo, She is anxious about something); English has only “to be”. You “know” 3×3=9 and you “know” someone: Spanish saber and conocer, respectively. A “fish” is pez in the water but pescado on your plate.

In Spanish, educación can mean two things, represented by the photographs above. English “education” only pertains to the left side. Photo on left, photographer unknown, from Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones Mexicanas (www.inehrm.gob.mx); photo on right, origin unknown. Both appear to be from the 1950′s.

But it isn’t always the language of Cervantes that makes the finer distinctions; in other cases, it’s Shakespeare’s that does so.

Take Spanish educación. Like English “education”., it can mean formal study. But it’s also what parents strive to inculcate in their children—in surface matters (saying “thank you” and “please”) and deeper ones (respect, gratitude, kindness). Manners and values: what English expresses by the word “upbringing” or, more popularly, “raising”.

To be called maleducado (literally: badly educated) is to be thought ill-mannered, disrespectful, selfish, or vulgar.

This second meaning of educación is probably the more important one in Spanish. To hear the expression “un hombre educado” (literally, an educated man) is chiefly to think of manners, values, character.

“Education starts in the home” is a widely shared view these days. In some ways, we can say that the Spanish wordeducación already contains this idea.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the January 13, 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.

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Word of a thousand disguises: the long, strange career of “freak”

Of masks, minds, sinners, and the word “person”

Lunary language and lore

Happy New Year, Feliz Año Nuevo…!

Is Día de Muertos/Day of the Dead a ‘Mexican Halloween’?

Summer, its names and romance

CIA and “SEE-ya”: Adventures in translating abbreviations

After the meal, the lovely (and untranslatable?) ‘sobremesa’

Did you see the Cuervos win Super Tazón XLVII?

Educación: education and upbringing

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