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Davis

2012-10-23 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: The Cha-Cha… and One More Hot Tamale

Dear reader,

This week let’s consider two Spanish words and their English translations: chachachá (that infectious rhythm born in Cuba) and tamal, which we looked at some weeks back.

From that musical colossus, Cuba, there emerged around 1953 another in a long line of dance sensations, a gently upbeat creation by composer, violinist and bandleader Enrique Jorrín.  It derived from the danzón, a rhythm generally played by smaller orchestras of refined or “French” sound, known as ”charangas”, with melodies typically carried by flute and violin.

Jorrín called his rhythm chachachá due to its triple rhythmic figure and the swishing sound of the dancer’s shoes against the floor. (The original onomatopoeia apparently was shashashá.)

In English, it loses the chá and becomes simply “cha-cha”: the name no longer reproduces the rhythm. But why?  We can suspect that phonetics played a role: it’s not easy for English speakers to pull off chachachá’s three crisp syllables (though musicians typically have no such trouble).

Phonetics, too, helped make “tamale” the English singular of Spanish tamal.  Besides the logical (though incorrect) inference that the singular of tamales was tamale, people’s ear told them that “tamale” sounded better in English—it has a pleasing sway and even conveys an exotic note in naming a food that for a century has been delighting North American taste buds.

So: one case of something lost, and another of something gained, in translation.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

A version of this article appeared in La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) published Oct. 21, 2012, along with a Spanish-language version.

Copyright © 2012 by Pablo J. Davis. All rights reserved.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", certificado, certified, cha-cha, chachachá, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, Davis, English, English-Spanish, español, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, Latin, Latin American, Latino, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, Spanish-English, traducción, traductor, translation

2012-10-09 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: Of “piropos”, praise, and pick-up lines

Dear readers,

An attractive young woman walks gracefully down the street, inspiring a gentleman standing at a storefront to call out, “¿Qué culpa tiene el árbol de haber nacido en el campo, y qué culpa mi corazón por amarte tanto?” [A tree stands on the ground where it was born, my heart by hopeless love is torn].

That rather old-fashioned scene features a free rendering into English of the sort of elegant, even poetic, compliment known in Spanish as a piropo (original meaning: a ruby or red garnet). This gallant form of praise  for  a  lady’s  charms,  though  scarcer  than  fifty or a hundred years   ago   on   the   streets   of   Zacatecas,   Ponce,  or Maracaibo (gentlemen’s remarks to ladies in the public thoroughfare now tending to the somewhat less  poetic),  still remains part of  everyday Hispanic/Latin American culture.

http://tinyurl.com/tuejanica2 offers some vintage piropos along with poetry on the subject and reflections on the waning, if not outright extinction, of the custom.

Translators  find  a  particular  challenge  and fascination  in  words  like  piropo  that name a concept either non-existent in the other language, or not central enough to the culture to have any simple means of expression. Dictionaries offer us either explanations that don’t exactly roll smoothly  off   the   tongue   (the Oxford Concise’s  “flirtatious/flattering  comment”),  or expressions that lose the spice and charm of the original (the Espasa-Calpe’s rather flat “compliment”).Some even use the still more pedestrian translation “line,” as in something a fellow might routinely use in a bar—likely far less poetic or gallant than what’s meant by  piropo.

Your thoughts, readers? Is there a good English equivalent for piropo—the word itself, or the custom it names?

¡Buenas palabras!

Copyright ©2012 Pablo J. Davis. Se reservan todos los derechos. All Rights Reserved. A version of this essay was first published, alongside its Spanish version, in La Prensa Latina, Memphis, Tennessee, on 19 August 2012.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", America, American, certified, compliment, cultura, culture, Davis, English, español, flirting, hispana, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, Julián, Latin American, latina, Latino, latinoamericana, line, male-female, Pablo, pick-up, piropo, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

2012-09-15 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: Taking and giving a test, and other mirrors

Dear readers,

It’s a pleasure to begin this series of explorations into language, and particularly into the curiosities and riddles of translating between English and Spanish.  I invite you to explore with me, starting with some cases of “mirrors” in which the same concept is expressed in opposite ways in the two languages.

One curious case: giving or taking a test.  In English, the teacher gives the test, the student takes it.  The Spanish situation is more complex.  In some countries (e.g. Peru, Chile, Argentina), it’s reversed: El estudiante da (gives) el examen, el maestro lo toma (takes it).

This isn’t because the student hands the completed exam to the teacher; rather, the logic is historical: in past times, oral examination was much more common in schools.  The teacher tomaba (took) the exam, in much the way that a judge would tomar declaración (hear or receive testimony).

In other countries, usage can be different.  In Mexico, for instance, the teacher usually da (gives) the exam, which the student tiene (has) or toma (takes).

However, in formal Spanish everywhere, students rinden (give) an exam.

Another mirror that can lead to confusion has to do with the word substitute.  In English, “to substitute pepper for salt” means to use pepper instead of salt.  In Spanish, the mirror sentence sustituir pimienta por sal means to drop pepper and use salt.

Moving from one language to another is fascinating—but sometimes traps of confusion lie in wait if we’re not careful!

Buenas palabras,

Pablo

This essay was first published, alongside its Spanish version, in La Prensa Latina, Memphis, Tennessee, on 22 July 2012.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: certified, cultura, culture, dar, Davis, English, español, exam, examen, give, idiomas, inglés, Julián, language, lenguaje, Memphis, Mid-South, Pablo, Spanish, take, test, tomar, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

2012-05-04 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Cinco de Mayo not the ‘real’ Mexican national day?

The sense of shared identity that binds an immigrant group together in its adopted home is no mere transplanting of old-country customs.  It involves creativity and innovation—and a dual process of celebrating ancestral ties while affirming group emergence into the fabric of life in the new country.

Calabrians, Sicilians, Tuscans, Abruzzians and other immigrants from the Italian Peninsula began to draw together in the late-19th-century U.S., just when a unified ‘Italy’ was being born.  Columbus Day, Oct. 12 (also, later, ‘Día de la Raza’ or ‘Day of the Hispanic/Latino People’) grew by the 20th century into an Italian-American affirmation.  For the Irish, whose history of mass immigration here is a half-century older, St. Patrick’s (St. Paddy’s) Day plays a similar role, as has Oktoberfest for German-Americans.

So, curious Americans’ periodic discovery that Cinco de Mayo –the Fifth of May—isn’t the ‘real’ Mexican national holiday (that would be Independence Day, Sep. 16), somewhat misses the point of the day: the affirmation of Mexicanness in a new land.

It commemorates not Mexico’s winning of independence from Spain (1821) but a more complex historical moment: Liberals’ 1862 military victory in the Battle of Puebla over French invaders and their Conservative allies.  Starting in the mid-1840s, Mexico was wracked by a sequence of horrors unimaginable to most Americans—half of national territory lost in the U.S.-Mexican War; prolonged civil war triggered by the Liberals’ (most famously Benito Juárez’s) anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic reforms; a British-French-Spanish triple invasion, ostensibly to collect debts from a land bled dry by war; and finally a full-blown French occupation in alliance with the civil war’s defeated Conservatives.

The Mexican triumph at Puebla, against a superior French force double in size, forms an imperfect and contradictory part of the larger historical story.  Ironies abound in its celebration.  For one thing, after Puebla the French actually prevailed, ruling Mexico for three years.  Also, a key figure at Puebla, young Gen. Porfirio Díaz, later became a dictatorial president whose endless, corrupt reelections eventually triggered the Mexican Revolution.

There are more ironies: the French had long dreamed of achieving footholds in former Spanish America.  In the 1830s, geographer Michel Chevalier coined the term ‘Latin America’—a completely novel invention designed to make France’s ambitions in the Americas sound natural and logical. It caught on among many newly-independent Mexicans, Argentines, Chileans, etc.,  eagerly seeking identities separate from Spain.  Moreover, the ruler Napoleon III sent to take the Mexican throne, Maximilian, was a naïve and ill-starred monarch who proved too liberal for the Conservatives, and awkwardly solicitous of Indian and mestizo peasants’ rights.  Eventually executed, he and his wife (haunted by madness during her widowhood) became tragic, romantic figures with a contradictory place in Mexican memory.

So Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s national holiday, not the commemoration of independence from Spain, nor of definitive victory against the French.  But Puebla preserves the memory of an unexpected victory after a generation of endless invasion, war, and loss.  As such, it has become a forum for expression of the new and continually evolving ways of being, and proudly feeling, Mexican in the United States—as well as an opportunity, partly superficial and commercial to be sure, for Americans to interact with Mexican culture.  Literally hundreds of local celebrations across the U.S. mark the day.

In an era when Mexico’s sons and daughters here face twin scourges of economic crisis and political vulnerability unlike any in living memory , it’s possible that Cinco de Mayo has never been quite as important as it is today.

Pablo Julián Davis

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., CT, received his graduate training in Latin American History at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities and a Certificate from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture, delivering seamless, world-class translation and interpreting to the legal community and other professions, as well as cultural awareness training.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", Cinco, Cinco de Mayo, Columbus Day, comparative, comparison, cultura, culture, Davis, German, German-American, Hispanic, Hispano, history, holidays, identity, immigrants, immigration, Interfluency, Irish, Irish-American, Italian, Italian-American, Italy, Julián, Latin, Latino, Mayo, Memphis, Mexican, Mexican-American, Mexico, Oktoberfest, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, St. Paddy's, St. Patrick's Day, States, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, United, United States, USA

2012-02-11 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

“Giants own Patriots” or “Papá Gigantes”?!!

With their stunning Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots, the New York Giants not only became NFL champions for the second time in a five-year span, they also extended their recent, but impressive, domination of the team that has been pro football’s standard of excellence for the past decade.

The Giants, in the phrase of the hour, “own” the Patriots. (One example among thousands: “It’s Official: The Giants Still Own the Patriots“.)

Think about that for a minute! Sports domination expressed in terms of ownership—the dominated rival as the “property” of the dominator.

People in the Spanish-speaking world have a different way of talking about this sort of dominance: the language of paternity. The dominant team, metaphorically, is the rival’s father: you’re ’Papá’… and the other team? Well, ’Los tenemos de hijos’ (They’re our sons). Thus, Spanish soccer is witness to ”la paternidad ‘cule’“, Barcelona’s ascendancy over Real Madrid.  In Mexico, fans of Pumas boast of their team as “papá” of rivals Cruz Azul and Chivas. Of course, in all cases, the assertion of paternal status is disputed by fans of the supposed “hijos” or sons.

In Argentine soccer, the hinchada (fans) of San Lorenzo swagger verbally before los bosteros (fans of Boca Juniors) as “Papá Santo” and proudly calculate “Un siglo de paternidad“, a century of fatherhood, over Boca Juniors.  (Boca fans protest that San Lorenzo’s superiority in head-to-head competition extends back only as far as the professional era, which began in 1930, and that when amateur-era records are figured in, Boca actually comes out with a slight advantage.)

Boca fanatics, for their part, love to lord it over River Plate as “Papá Boca”, crowing particularly loudly now that River has suffered the humiliation of descenso—relegation to a lower league. (The illustration above right brings alive this whole sense of River as “hijo”; the Boca fan also uses his left hand to make a visual joke around the insulting nickname rivals use for River, gallinas, meaning ‘chickens’ or ‘hens’.) Indeed, there is a Facebook page entitled“Para Mi Hijo River, De Su Papá Boca” (For My Son River, From Your Daddy Boca).

While usually expressing sporting dominance as “ownership”, US culture is not completely alien to using the language of paternity. The phrase “Who’s your Daddy?” has made occasional appearances; the query became a catch-phrase of the Duke University men’s basketball team, and star player Shane Battier, around the year 2000.

The phrase really became notorious, though, during the 2003 baseball season. That year, the brilliant Dominican right-hander Pedro Martínez, one of the greatest pitchers of his generation, and at the time a member of the Boston Red Sox, was repeatedly frustrated by the New York Yankees. After a particularly galling defeat, he told reporters: “They beat me. They’re that good right now. They’re that hot. I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.”

Martínez was raked over the coals for this comment. The derision was relentless; Yankee Stadium, in particular, resounded with the chant, “Who’s your Daddy?” whenever he was pitching. Some of the glee in this mockery drew on the (at least vaguely sensed) sexual connotations of the phrase.

I am aware, though, of no one ever pointing out the sources in Hispanic/Latin American culture that were likely at play in Martínez’s unconscious mind, influencing him to express his frustration in that particular way. Martínez was also demonstrating a sense of underlying security, sportsmanship, and good humor with his remark. It’s conceivable, though, that calling the Yankees ‘Daddy’ was a mistake, actually compromising his ability to execute effectively against them. For this superlative performer and fierce competitor was, from then on, repeatedly stymied by the New Yorkers—most notably in the 2009 World Series, as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies. Or maybe the word was simply the perfect expression of the Yankees’ sustained command over him.

Still, the framework of domination-as-ownership prevails in US culture, and the framework of paternal authority in the Spanish-speaking world.  It’s no accident. Commercial relations and property rights have a salience in the English-speaking world, and particularly the United States, that Hispanic/Latin American culture lacks. It’s not that these things are absent in the latter culture, but rather that they are nowhere near as central to the popular imagination. There, instead, the family still retains much of its ancient symbolic power as the fundamental ordering unit of society, and the underlying metaphor for virtually every social relationship.

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., C.T. is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture (TM), which delivers Spanish and English translation solutions as well as interactive, inspiring cultural training.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", Argentina, baseball, cultura, culture, Davis, dominance, domination, frameworks, Hispanic, interpreter, interpreting, language, Latin, Latin American, Latino, Memphis, Mid-South, ownership, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Red Sox, rivalry, soccer, sports, superiority, Tennessee, translation, translator, USA, World Series, Yankees

2012-01-12 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

The funny Spanish letter with the squiggle on top

January is, of course, the month when New Year’s greetings are exchanged: “Happy New Year” in English, Feliz Año Nuevo en español. The Spanish words for “year” and for the language itself both contain the single most readily-identifiable visible marker of the Spanish language: the letter ñ, pronounced ‘EN-yeh’.  Ñ is a letter, but so much more: its cultural significance is great and seems only to be growing.

The ‘ny’ in English ‘canyon’ is the sound this letter represents. Indeed, that word comes from the Spanish cañón which can mean ‘canyon’ (like El Gran Cañón del Colorado, The Grand Canyon) or ‘cannon’ (the weapon). The job the single letter ñ does to represent the ‘ny’ sound in Spanish is done by two letters in other languages: in Italian and French by gn, and in Portuguese by nh, for instance. So lasagna is spelled lasanha in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon, but lasaña in Caracas and Buenos Aires.

So powerful is this letter (which many non-Spanish speakers think of as an ‘N with a little squiggle on top’) as a marker of Spanish-ness that one often hears English speakers add it to Spanish words that actually have only a simple ‘N’. For instance, the habanero pepper is often pronounced in English as if it were habañero.  This sort of thing happens a lot in language and is known as ‘hyper-correction’: the speaker makes an extra effort to be correct, and overdoes it.  It’s the same reason people sometimes say “They sent a letter to he and I.”

The familiarity of ñ to English speakers, especially in the United States, is reinforced by its presence in a number of words in common use: piñata, jalapeño, mañana, niño, España, español, and others.

Extract from Antonio de Nebrija’s pioneering grammar of the Spanish language, published in 1492, a year of some significance in Spanish, and world, history

But where did this peculiar letter come from?  Historical linguists  tell us that in the Middle Ages, Spanish words originating in Latin that had a double n came to be pronounced ‘ny’. The phonetic term for this is ‘palatalization’: rather than the tip of the tongue touching the front of the palate, at the edge of the teeth, the tongue is brought all the way up to the palate, or roof of the mouth, and a larger section of the tongue touches the palate.  Thus, what had been an ‘n’ sound becomes ‘ny’. That is one part of the story—the sound.

And sound seems to be an important part of ñ‘s appeal. Some linguists of Spanish believe that the palatalization ofn is a strong phonetic tendency in infancy, which has led to a series of words beginning with ñ and having a childish (or sometimes, by extension, foolish) connotation. Some examples: ñoño (silly, insipid), ñoñería (foolishness),ñaña (nursemaid, big sister), ñato (snub-nosed, or simply a child), ñiquiñaque (person or thing of little value).  Other linguists have pointed to the ñ sound as a marker of the Spanish language’s expansion to the Americas—and the impact of the native languages of the Americas on it.  Words like ñañdú (an ostrich-like bird of South America) andñañdubay (a hardwood) come from the Guaraní.  Others testify to African influence: ñame (yam) and ñánigo(member of the Abakuá male secret societies of African origin), while still others come from elsewhere: ñoqui is simply Hispanized phonetics for Italian gnocchi.

Besides sound, the other part of the story comes to us from paleographers, who study ancient writing: parchment, the paper of its day, was very expensive; to save space, writers or copyists of manuscripts placed one n—a smaller one—atop the other. So, in truth, the ‘single’ letter ñ was born as the fusion of two n‘s. (The ampersand, not unique to Spanish, was similarly born as a digraph, or combination of two letters: Latin et, meaning ‘and’.)

Throughout the modern history of the language, then, ñ has been a distinctive, instantly recognizable feature of Spanish writing and type: the fifteenth letter of the alphabet (for centuries it was the sixteenth, as the consonant combination ch, between c and d, was fourth; the reform of the year 2010 eliminated ch, as well as ll, as separate letters of the alphabet).

The age of the computer and the Internet brought with it a serious challenge to the survival of ñ, and revealed perhaps unsuspected depths of feeling towards it among Spanish speakers.  In the early 1990s, unease arose in Spain over the exporting to that country of computer keyboards without the ñ (as well as the inverted marks that are used to open exclamations or questions).  When the Spanish Government openly expressed its distress and raised the possibility of requiring computers sold in Spain to have an ñ key, the European Community cried “Foul!” and alleged protectionism.

At the same time, a wave of emotional defenses of ñ began to surge throughout the Spanish-speaking world.  Famously, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez lashed out at the “arrogance” and “abuse” in the drive to eliminate ñ for reasons of mere “commercial convenience.” The Argentine poet María Elena Walsh, beloved composer of children’s music, also defended  “this letter that is ours, this letter with its little hood, something that might seem insignificant, but is less ñoño [silly] than it might seem . . . The ñ is people.”  Somehow ñ became a symbol—the symbol—of  what was distinctive and unique about the Spanish language and the cultures that use it.

Finally, Spain passed a law in 1993 protecting ñ by requiring computer keyboards sold in the country to include it; invoking the Maastricht Treaty’s of cultural differences.  Luis Durán Rojo, from Peru, tells this story engagingly.  Of course, millions of Spanish speakers living outside of Spain and Latin America use laptops and other devices that lack an ñ key, and are not aware of how to produce that character (in Word, you press Control and Shift together, then the tilde key, then the letter n).  The Spanish of emails, tweets, and instant messages is full of attempts to render the sound either phonetically (anio and the much less common anyo), Portuguese style (anho),  or in Italian orthography (agno) for año. It is not uncommon to see ‘Feliz Ano Nuevo’—either an honest mistake by English speakers or a slightly off-color joke by hispanohablantes, as without the ñ‘s tilde it literally means ‘Happy New Anus’.

If the outcry over a ‘mere’ letter of the alphabet seems a bit silly, consider the reaction in the U.S. to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.  That act of Congress, mandating (in an unspecified way and without a clear timetable) the “increasing” use of the metric system in the United States, created a U.S. Metric Board in charge of public education towards that end. More than one Jeremiad about the loss of our cultural identity was heard in the land; there was also ridicule (comedians joked about pushy people: “Give them 2.54 cm and they’ll take 1.6 km”).  The USMB was disbanded by 1982, and a quarter-century later, use of the metric system in the U.S. is incomplete and irregular at best.

So the ñ survives, and in the process has become much more than a mere letter. In both the Spanish-speaking world and in the U.S. (which, in truth, is part of that world, having some 40 million inhabitants for whom Spanish is either the sole, dominant, or maternal language), this letter symbolizes a language, a culture, a population. Thus, the weekly cultural supplement of Buenos Aires’s Clarín, one of Latin America’s largest-circulation daily newspapers, called Ñ, is now in its tenth year.  On its logo, cable network CNN en Español uses a large tilde (the ‘squiggle’) over both N’s. In 1999, Newsweek touted ‘Generation Ñ’, a phrase coined by Cuban-American publisher Bill Teck to name the magazine he founded, aimed at young North Americans of Latin American descent.

A series of little accidents, circumstances, and oddities of language and history led here: the double ‘N’ consonant in certain Latin words inherited by Spanish, palatalization leading to the ‘ny’ sound, the placing of one of the N’s atop the other… let bake for several centuries, turn up the heat of globalization and the imposition of standards, leading to the assertion of the rising cultural, demographic, and economic power of Spain, Latin America, and U.S. Hispanics/Latinos—and a once quaint and humble letter stands tall and looms large now, a sort of ambassador for an entire language and culture.

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., C.T. is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture (TM), which delivers Spanish and English translation solutions as well as interactive, inspiring cultural training.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", alphabet, cultura, culture, Davis, English, español, globalization, Hispanic, hispanos, immigration, inglés, Interfluency, Latino, latinos, letters, ñ, Pablo, paleography, phonetics, Spanish, translation

2011-12-13 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

When does Tuesday=Friday? More adventures in translating culture!

Imagine you’re translating a document, from English into Spanish. Say it’s a letter, dated Tuesday, December 13, 2011 (that’s today).  How do you translate that into Spanish? Well, that’s not too difficult: you’d render it as ‘martes, 13 diciembre 2011′, or perhaps ‘martes, 13 de diciembre de 2011′.

Martes 13, Tuesday the 13th: a combination of day and date that run afoul of widely-held popular superstition in the Spanish-speaking world.

(Wall calendar for January 1931, a month with a ‘martes 13′ – Tuesday the 13th. By the famed artist and cartoonist Florencio Molina Campos, whose humorous but loving depictions of old-time scenes and characters of the  Pampa have adorned wall calendars in Argentina for the better part of a century.) 

The bad luck commonly held to attach to ‘martes 13′ actually comes in a double dose. To the triskadekafobia (a terrific Greek word, composed of thirteen+fear, that has the lovely property of sounding exactly like the thing it designates) that Hispanic/Latin American culture shares with Anglo-Saxon and many others across the world, is added a negative apprehension surrounding Tuesday. Tuesday aversion is not common in the English-speaking world (though in the cycle of the work week, it’s certainly not many people’s favorite day). Think of the nursery rhyme foretelling a child’s fortune from the day of its birth (“Tuesday’s child is full of grace…”), or old Solomon Grundy who was ”christened on Tuesday”.

In Spanish, though, the name for the second day following the Christian Sabbath is martes, Mars’s Day.  Around this deity, most commonly known as the Roman god of war (equivalent to the Greeks’ Ares), spin a series of negative qualities: aggression, duplicity, hostility, selfishness. Reputedly despised by both his parents, Zeus and Hera, Mars could be worshipped for his valor and power (and apparently Venus did so), but perhaps more often feared. Herein lies at least part of the reason why Tuesday’s stock is so low in Hispanic-Latin American culture. “Día martes,” goes the well-known folk saying reflecting this, “no te cases ni te embarques” [On Tuesday, marry not nor set sail].

So, thinking of all these associations, let’s go back to our little translation problem. Only now, let’s imagine the year is not 2011 but rather 1980, and what we need to ‘move across’ (the original, physical meaning of ‘translate‘) from English to Spanish is not the date of a letter but the title of a movie. Specifically, director Sean Cunningham’s newly-released horror flick Friday the 13th (still with us almost a third of a century later, having reached twelve installments and a grand total of eleven different directors; is anyone truly in suspense over whether there will be a Part 13?).

With strict ‘dictionary accuracy’, we could release the film under the title Viernes 13.  But to tap into the deeper resonances within Hispanic/Latin American culture, maybe we would better off shifting the day of the week to Tuesday and rendering the title as Martes 13.  And that’s exactly what happened in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries of the Spanish-speaking world. However, the direct or ‘dictionary’ translation was used in still other countries, including Mexico and Spain.

One result of this convoluted set of circumstances: the association of Friday the 13th with bad luck, not native to Hispanic/Latin American culture, has to some extent been ‘imported’ from the English-speaking world—due to the power of what is often called popular, and might more accurately be termed commercial, culture.

And, let us not forget, it’s due also to the influence of an often overlooked group of ‘unacknowledged legislators’: members of the translators’ profession, whose decisions can have a significant impact on human affairs. What’s at stake is clearer when we think of the texts of laws and treaties, or the way that a statesman’s words are translated in a tense international negotiation. But even in this seemingly trivial example of a movie title, there are ‘real world’ implications. People’s likelihood of making certain personal or economic decisions—travel, a purchase, an apartment rental—is influenced by beliefs regarding numbers, dates, days of the week.

More adventures in the world of translation, this science, craft, and art all at the same time! And never more challenging than when cultural phenomena are what we’re translating.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: cultural, culture, Davis, English, English-Spanish, español, folk, Hispanic, inglés, Julián, Latin, Latin American, Latino, Memphis, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, Spanish-English, Tennessee, traducción, traductor, translation, translators

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    • Tonight, sometime around midnight, will mark the 300th anniversary of… well… how shall I put it?
    • Drinking a unique toast
    • The violent alienation of “ajeno”
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    Interfluency Translation+ Culture offers top-quality, reliable, professional services in two broad areas: linguistic and cultural. We also consult to help organizations identify and implement meaningful, quality solutions to cultural and language-related challenges.

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    3.4.18 Tonight, sometime around midnight, will mark the 300th anniversary of… well… how shall I put it?

    By PABLO J. DAVIS Sunday, March 4, 2018 Tonight marks an extraordinary anniversary… of an extremely ordinary event, one that occurs millions of times a day around the world. ...

    12.20.17 Drinking a unique toast

    Enlace para español/ Click here for Spanish Dear reader, In this season, many a glass is raised and “toasts” offered. The word seems to come from an old custom of using spiced ...

    12.10.17 The violent alienation of “ajeno”

    Enlace para español/Click here for Spanish Dear reader, Recently your faithful servant stumbled across a recording of a song he had heard from time to time, but has now had a chance ...

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