cultura

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

2013-04-10 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

“Yours truly” and other linguistic gestures of modesty

Dear reader,

In English, an indirect and somewhat humorous way to refer to oneself is “yours truly”, a phrase originating in the common closing for letters (Spanish “Atentamente”is similar).

Phrases like “yours truly” (or Spanish “su servidor” and its variants) are small linguistic gestures of modesty. But here, as so often happens, subtle but striking cultural differences can be seen in how the languages make the gesture.

It’s widely used, for example in statements like “That painting was done by yours truly”.

The Spanish equivalent is “este servidor” or its variants,“un servidor” and “su servidor”, all meaning something like “your servant”.

And here we see an intriguing difference: both phrases, it’s true, are linguistic gestures of modesty or humility—a way to avoid saying “I” (English) or “yo” (Spanish). But something about the Spanish version is somehow more formal, even archaic.

Can you imagine the guffaws if someone said, in English, “That painting was done by your humble servant”?

Moreover, English speech uses “I” constantly (observe how that imperial pronoun is the only one that gets capitalized in English!) while Spanish “yo” is heard much less frequently. The reasons are partly—but, in my view, only partly—grammatical: conjugated Spanish verbs almost always clearly indicate the person. For instance, in“Toco la guitarra” the “yo” (I) is understood, it’s clear that the meaning is “I play the guitar”. In English, in contrast, “I play”, “you play”, “we play” can be told apart only by the pronoun.

Careful, though: this is in no way to say that Hispanics/Latinos are all modest, and English speakers all self-centered—an absurdly vast generalization. What we can see in that self-effacing avoidance of “yo” (I), though, is an expression in everyday language of a deeply-rooted cultural ideal of the Hispanic world.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 por Pablo Julián Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the 3-9 March 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo J. Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (English>Spanish) and a Tennessee Supreme Court Certified Court Interpreter (English<>Spanish).

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

The riddle of “fish”

Dear reader,

Here’s a little puzzle: how do you translate the noun “fish” into Spanish?

A moment’s reflection shows us that, without some context or a visual image, we can’t be sure of the solution. That “fish”, in the river, is translated as pez, but in the fisherman’s nets, or the cook’s pot, it’s a pescado.

In English a fish is a fish, but in Spanish it really matters (especially to the fish) whether it’s a pez or a pescado. (Above are perch in one or the other circumstance.)

What’s most interesting is not so much the obvious fact that good translation requires contextual information, but rather that Spanish makes a distinction as to whether the fish is free, caught, or cooked, while English lumps these senses into the single word “fish”. Another puzzle: how to translate dedo from Spanish to English? Well, it depends on whether the digits are attached to hands (“fingers”) or feet (“toes”). In this case, unlike fish, it’s English that differentiates, while Spanish lumps.

English also differentiates “party” from “holiday” (in Spanish, both are fiesta), “upbringing” from “education” (both Spanish educación).

But English “to be” lumps ser (essence, as in ser madre, to be a mother) and estar (temporary condition, as in estar ansioso, to be anxious). And where English has “Congratulations!”, Spanish differentiates between ¡Felicitaciones! for, say, winning a prize and ¡Felicidades! on the birth of a child.

A useful lesson: neither English nor Spanish can be said, in any sweeping way, to be more subtle than the other. As in the Inuits’ (Eskimos’) mythical “400 words for snow”, each language has areas where it makes fine distinctions, and others where it lumps senses together into a single word.

Good words!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All Rights Reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the March 17-23, 2013 issue of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation” weekly, bilingual column. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator as well as a Tennessee Supreme Court Certified Court Interpreter for Spanish.

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

Two little letters, a translator’s riddle

Dear reader,

Last week, we took on a translation puzzle: how to render the English noun fish into Spanish. It turned out that in that language, it matters whether the creature is alive and kicking, so to speak, in the water (in which case it’s a pez), or lying on a dinner plate (pescado).

That distinction is absent in English, where a fish is a fish is a fish. But a quick review of a series of other words showed us that neither language should be thought more subtle than the other: for every case likepez/pescado, there’s another where it’s English that makes the distinction (fingers and toes are both dedos in Spanish).

Let’s consider another puzzle: how to translate into English the expression“¡Dios me la bendiga!” Without the indirect object pronoun me, the phrase would be rendered simply as “God bless you!” (spoken to a woman).

But that little pronoun me certainly complicates things.

In a similar expression, like “Se me murió el perro”, me expresses how personally affected the speaker is by the death of his or her dog. Informal English can convey this with “on me”: “The dog died on me”.

But in the invocation to divine blessing, that phrasing wouldn’t exactly fit. Here the Spanish me is almost untranslatable. But we can convey something of it by rephrasing to something like: “My prayer is that God bless you”.

Good words!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All Rights Reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the March 24-30, 2013 issue of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation” weekly, bilingual column. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator as well as a Tennessee Supreme Court Certified Court Interpreter for Spanish.

2013-02-10 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Happy Birthday, Jorge Washington

Dear reader,

This edition of “Mysteries and Enigmas” marks the thirtieth time we’ve shared questions and curiosities related to travels between Spanish and English, that journeying between languages and cultures that we call translation. Thanks for the good company!

An imagining of the Founding Father’s signature with first name Hispanicized, as he was long referred to traditionally in the Spanish language.

The third Monday in February (the 18th, this year) brings the commemoration of the first president’s birthday. (Though many call it ‘Presidents’ Day’, assuming it to be a joint tribute to Washington, born Feb. 22, and Lincoln, Feb. 12, by federal law it continues to be Washington’s Birthday.)

In Spanish, the “Father of His Country” was, until recently, typically called Jorge Washington. This usage has declined in recent decades, though; since the ‘70s George Washington is more frequent, though Jorge has by no means disappeared.

Thus, it was long customary to Hispanicize the US statesman’s name (and the name of the king whose dominion over The Thirteen Colonies Gen. Washington helped to end: Jorge III). Likewise, Tomás Jefferson, Carlos Dickens, Juan Sebastián Bach, and Alejandro Dumas were more prevalent than Thomas, Charles, Johann Sebastian,and Alexandre, respectively.

In this, Spanish isn’t unique (note Georges, Georg, and Giorgio Washington in French, German, and Italian). But the phenomenon was particularly strong in Hispanic culture.

The reasons for this quaint custom, no doubt complex, may relate to an old, deeply-rooted sense of a historia universal, a literatura universal: roughly “world history” and “world literature” but with a different connotation: the sense of a larger something, a culture to which we all belonged—making Washington, Bach, Dickens, in a sense, not really foreigners to educated speakers of Spanish.

Paradoxically, the custom’s decline would seem linked to the dramatically accelerated circulation of texts and images in today’s world, because that circulation is so heavily influenced by US English and its attendant culture—which in general, other than for the names of saints and popes, does not share this Hispanic custom.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. This essay was originally written for the 17 February 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column entitled “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 (English<>Spanish).

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.

2013-02-03 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Spanish on the Map/El español en el mapa

San Fernando de las Barrancas, Spanish fort at what would become the site of Memphis, Tennessee; c. 1795 …… San Fernando de las Barrancas, fuerte español en la que devendría la ubicación de Memphis, Tennessee; c. 1795.

Aquí Memphis: Spanish on the Memphis and Mid-South Map

Free Public Lecture by Dr. Pablo J. Davis

February 7, 2013 (6:00 – 7:45 p.m.) at Pink Palace Museum, 3050 Central Ave., Memphis TN 38111

Florida, Texas, and California, not Memphis and the Mid-South, are what come most readily to mind when we think of Spanish place names in the US. Yet Gayoso Ave. downtown; nearby Cordova TN; De Soto County MS; and San Fernando de las Barrancas (the Spanish fort built in 1795 near about where the Pyramid stands today) are just some of the historical and cultural traces of the Spanish language and Hispanic/Latin American culture in Memphis and the surrounding region. Dr. Pablo J. Davis’s lecture will explore these links and place them in the broader context of Mid-South toponyms.

Dr. Davis, a graduate of Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities in Latin American History, with a certificate from the University of Buenos Aires, is a certified professional translator/interpreter as well as cultural educator and trainer (www.interfluency.com); his bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation” appears weekly in La Prensa Latina and at the interfluency.wordpress.com blog.

Date: February 7, 2013 Reception: 6:00 – 6:30pm Lecture: 6:30 – 7:30pm Q & A: 7:30 – 8:00pm

Admission is free and reservations are not required. Lecture is in English, however, during Q&A questions or comments may be made in Spanish and will be interpreted.

For more information, please call 901-636-2389 (for information in Spanish, please email pablo@interfluency.com or call 901-288-3018)

2013-01-13 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Lagniappe, beef jerky, and the Incas

A representation of the famous rope bridges of the Inca Empire, one of that culture’s many stunning achievements. From the monumental visual history of Peru,Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala.

Dear reader,

An Argentine reader of this column asks us how to translate yapa into English.

This fascinating word refers to a small addition of merchandise given to a customer without charge, or more broadly to any small extra amount of something.

It comes from Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. Quechua-Spanish contact was massive from 1532; from it come Spanish words like cancha (sports field), ñato (snub-nosed), choclo (ear of corn), poroto(bean), papa (potato), and mate (an herb tea).

To translate “yapa” into English we use French: the word lagnappe (orlagniappe). The road took several turns. Ñapa is a palatalized variant ofyapa, where the first sound is produced bringing the tongue up to the palate.

It turns out that French speakers in Louisiana, an area having much contact with Spanish, heard “la ñapa” as one word and spelled it French-style: lagnappe. In French (like Italian) ‘gn’ makes the ‘ñ’ sound (ny), but adding the ‘i’ made the pronunciation clearer for English speakers. Lagniappe can also mean tip (gratuity) or even kickback.

In Mexico, the merchant’s small gift to the customer is known as a pilón or piloncillo. The latter word also means a small pyramid-shaped mass of unrefined sugar. The connection may be that pilloncillos themselves were a typicalyapa, or perhaps from the idea of the tip that completes the mountain. (Mexico Bob’s entertaining and thorough exploration of the word pilón can be found here.)

In English, the word “bonus” is common, and the expression “a baker’s dozen” (meaning thirteen) conveys in a picturesque way the idea of a yapa.

Another Quechua-derived word, charque (or charqui) means dried and salted meat. Its English translation, as withyapa, preserves the Andean root: “jerky”and the adjectival form, as in Jamaican “jerked chicken”.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. An earlier version of this essay was originally written for the January 20, 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.

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.

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

Two kinds of congratulations… and how Spanish expresses them

Dear reader,

For some weeks now, the air has been filled with greetings and good wishes: “Happy Holidays”, “Merry Christmas,” “Season’s Greetings” and, for a few days yet, “Happy New Year”. In Spanish: Felices Fiestas, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Año Nuevo.

There’s one Spanish greeting, though, that English can’t quite reproduce: “¡Felicidades!”

Many English speakers (and even some native Spanish speakers) confuse this interjection with the similar-sounding “¡Felicitaciones!” English routinely expresses both ideas by the single word: “Congratulations!”

The felicitaciones/felicidades pair offers a beautiful example of the subtle shades of meaning that a language (in this case, Spanish) can express.

The distinction is significant: felicitación is an act of praise or congratulation, while felicidad refers to that sublime and blessed state of the human heart, happiness.

Thus a graduation, a promotion, an award, indeed any achievement or victory, merits a congratulatory“¡Felicitaciones!” (An alternative particularly common in Spain: “¡Enhorabuena!”)

On the other hand, transcendent moments of the human condition, the annual cycle, or the great life passages—the birth of a child, a birthday, a wedding, or, indeed, a New Year—inspire the warmer and more elevated“¡Felicidades!”: a wish for much happiness.

It’s fascinating to speculate on the cultural source of this distinction, absent from English. Is Spanish more emotive? Perhaps. We propose, instead, that the answer lies in a stronger sense of ritual and ceremony in the tongue of Cervantes.

¡Buenas palabras… y felicidades!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the January 6, 2013edition 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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After the meal, the lovely (and untranslatable?) ‘sobremesa’

“Yours truly” and other linguistic gestures of modesty

The riddle of “fish”

Two little letters, a translator’s riddle

Happy Birthday, Jorge Washington

Did you see the Cuervos win Super Tazón XLVII?

Spanish on the Map/El español en el mapa

Lagniappe, beef jerky, and the Incas

Educación: education and upbringing

Two kinds of congratulations… and how Spanish expresses them

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