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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.

2013-05-02 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

How we “save a file” in Spanish

Dear reader,

It’s something yours truly will do in a few minutes, you will likely do more than once today… and forgetting to do it can sometimes bring real headaches.

We’re talking about one of the most common, ordinary acts of contemporary life: preserving what you’ve written or changed in a computer document: “saving a file”. This term has no single, accepted Spanish translation; rather, there are various options.

When you stop to think about it, “file” is a strange noun to use for a single document; its ordinary, non-computing meanings are a device, drawer, or piece of furniture where documents are kept; or a folder holding papers on a matter or topic. The computing sense of “file” is usually rendered as Spanish documento or archivo, with the latter increasingly dominant.

Archivo, whose standard meanings include a cabinet or archive (a room or building where many documents are held), is also a curious thing to call a letter or other simple document.

And “to save”? Here, also, there are two main possibilities: salvar or guardar. The first directly translates “save”, but with a discordant connotation of rescue that the English word can shed. The second conveys well the notion of preserving, but with the added sense of putting away—which doesn’t quite fit, as we “save a file” frequently while working on it.

Both languages struggle with the novelty of computing: what we do when we “save a file” has no exact analogy in the world of pen and paper, or even typewriter.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright © 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the 5-11 May 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as part of the weekly bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (Eng>Spa) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Court Interpreter (Eng<>Spa).

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

2013-04-12 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

How do you translate a sneeze… or a kiss?

Dear reader,

Onomatopeia, a powerful expressive resource, represents in written or spoken language a sound, action, or phenomenon. Some months back, we looked at some animal sounds, like the rooster’s “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” that Spanish expresses as ¡Kikirikí or ¡Cocoricó!

¿”¡Chuik!” ó “¡Muá!”… ?¿O tal vez, de acuerdo al inglés, “Smooch!”?

This week, let’s consider some human sounds, starting with the little explosion that is a sneeze. Spanish represents it as ¡Achís! (ah-CHEESS) or¡Achús! (ah-CHOOSS); the second, less common, is similar to English “Ah-choo!”

Since sneezing is physiological, much more than cultural or linguistic, it’s evident that each language “hears” or “interprets” the sound uniquely.

Sometimes the languages differ widely. Spanish represents a kiss as ¡Chuik! (chweek) or ¡Muá! (mwah); English, as “Smooch!” For physical revulsion, Spanish uses ¡Puaj! (pwach, with guttural Germanic/Scots ‘ch’) or ¡Uf; typical in English is “Yuk!” or its infantile adjective form, as in “That’s yucky!” The latter’s one of the first words children in Spanish-speaking homes learn from English-speaking schoolmates.

Throat-clearing, on the other hand—a physiological act, that can also be used expressively to get someone’s attention or request silence—is similar: ¡Ejem! is almost identical to English “Ahem!”

Exclamations of pain are a curious case: the Spanish speaker stubbing her toe on a rock cries “Ayyy!” (like the letter ‘I’), nothing like English “Ouch!” or “Oww!” It turns out that an act one would think purely physiological is actually cultural, and that pain is “pronounced” differently from language to language.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright © 2013 por Pablo Julián Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the 21-26 April 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).

2013-04-10 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.

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Summer, its names and romance

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

How we “save a file” in Spanish

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

How do you translate a sneeze… or a kiss?

“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?

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