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2012-05-18 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Friday thought: Why “See you Monday” ≠ “Hasta el lunes”

All over the US on a Friday like today, millions of people are wishing co-workers a good weekend and saying “See you Monday.” What if you wanted to say it to a co-worker from Mexico, Colombia, or Puerto Rico—in Spanish? Translating directly from English, you might say, “Nos vemos el lunes” (literally: We’ll see each other on Monday) or perhaps, a little more freely, “Hasta el lunes” (Until Monday).

But to most Spanish speakers, those phrases will sound a little threadbare. Something is missing… But what?

Just three little words: “Si Dios quiere.” This is how a large proportion of Spanish speakers would utter the common end-of-workweek farewell: “Hasta el lunes, si Dios quiere.” Si Dios quiere: If God so wishes, or, in more idiomatic English, God willing.

So why is this phrase so important? Is Latin American and Spanish culture so much more deeply religious than that of the United States? Do most Spanish speakers live in constant fear of accident and illness? Or could it be that the phrase isn’t really that important? Perhaps it’s just a little remnant, a cultural tic whose meaning is lost. Perhaps it’s like saying “God bless you” when someone sneezes, a gesture without real import.

I suggest that it’s more than that… quite a bit more. The key lies in the discomfort that most native Spanish speakers tend to feel when they hear the phrase uttered without those three little words. It’s hard to put that discomfort into words: perhaps it’s that the phrase sounds too self-assured, too smug… too proud. Overconfident. Perhaps even a little impious, a little blasphemous. Who knows what Monday will bring? Who knows what the future has in store? Keep in mind: this is almost never a conscious thought. Rather, it’s a deeply held, almost entirely unconscious standpoint towards life.

A close relative of this phenomenon is found in the common conversational exchange of inquiring after one another’s well-being. “¿Cómo estás?” (How are you?) is most frequently answered not simply with “Bien” (Fine) or “Bien, gracias” (Fine, thanks), or even “Bien, gracias ¿y tú?” (Fine, thanks, and you?)—but, rather, “Bien, gracias a Dios” (literally: Fine, thank God).

These phrases wouldn’t sound natural in most everyday English-language contexts. In certain settings it might, such as a religious community. There, something like, “Fine, praise God!” is not unusual. If we think of older generations—perhaps our grandparents’ generation, or that of their parents—we may also remember hearing phrases like this in English. In rural and small-town settings, folk(sy) expressions like, “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise” are still fairly unremarkable.

In ordinary, spoken English, though, responding to “How are you?” with “Fine, thank God!” makes the asker wonder if the other person has just survived an auto accident, a serious illness, or some other ordeal. Try the thought experiment yourself: or better yet, do an actual social experiment and reply, “Fine, thank God!” to the next person who asks how you are doing. Watch that person’s face and you’ll very likely see surprise or puzzlement.

Ultimately, these three little words (“Si Dios quiere” and “Gracias a Dios”) suggest a lot about what it’s like to live in the culture that Spanish language expresses. The feelings about the world, and the premises underlying those feelings, are different. To those who have grown up bilingual, and carry in their bones the sensation of moving back and forth across cultural boundaries—what I call Interfluency, the name of my translation and cultural-training company—there are subtly, but unmistakably, different ways of being alive in the world on one or the other side of the boundary.

In English, particularly US English, there is a confident, even bold attitude towards the future and an expectation of success. In Spanish, by contrast, there is at least a gesture of humility, a small linguistic ceremony of respect in the face of life and its uncertainties. If this attitude can be called religious, it certainly does not belong to any one church or denomination. “God” may be thought of as the deity or simply as a way of talking about the unknowable.

For those interested in exploring these issues, I recommend Javier Villatoro’s lovely and perceptive essay, “Dios mediante: la percepción cultural del futuro en la lengua española”—of which I only became aware as I was finishing these lines.

More broadly, I would point readers to the wisdom in the Spanish master Miguel de Unamuno, and particularly in his Tragic Sense of Life (El sentimiento trágico de la vida, first published in English translation in 1921). For me, “Si Dios quiere” has something to do with the tragic sense—tragic not in any morbid or pessimistic way, but rather in a recognition of life’s uncertainties and human limitations.

Those uncertainties, those limitations somehow find little place in contemporary US English with its sleek surfaces and aerodynamic speed. But their recognition still breathes in the very pulse of Spanish, and to have grown up in that language is to feel that recognition.

“Si Dios quiere”—like the largely passé English God willing, the Portuguese (Spanish’s fraternal twin) Se Deus quiser, the Arabic Inshallah (whose direct descendant, “ojalá” is still deeply entrenched in contemporary Spanish), the Hebrew and Yiddish Halevai—can be seen, then, as bearing witness to a deeply rooted view of life.

That it’s more than a mere verbal formula, more than an empty gesture, is borne out by the unease most people of Latin American or Iberian birth or origins feel at the bare brashness of an unqualified “See you Monday!”

* * *

Thanks for visiting. Your thoughts on what’s written here, whether of the ‘Amen, brother!’, the ’I agree in part, but I wonder if you’ve considered…’ or even the ‘You’re crazy!’ variety, are very welcome. Please comment, and if you find time spent at this blog worthwhile, please consider subscribing. Nos vemos pronto: See you again soon… si Dios quiere.

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; his undergraduate studies were at the University of Maryland, College Park. 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 innovative, interactive, and inspiring cultural-awareness training.

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.

2011-12-23 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas, and other greetings of the season

When a 25-year-old guitarist named José Montserrate Feliciano García, from the historic Puerto Rican town of Lares (birthplace of the country’s 19th century movement for independence from Spain) recorded an album of Christmas music released by RCA Victor Latino in 1970, he did a number of things.

First, thanks mainly to the extremely simple but catchy title track, “Feliz Navidad,” he vaulted to worldwide fame as a recording artist.

Second, in the public perception of his artistry, he became trapped by that success: most music fans are unaware of Feliciano’s breathtaking mastery as a virtuoso of the guitar (much as pop singing success obscured the vast musical talents of artists like Nat Cole and George Benson).

And third and most importantly in this season, young José Feliciano made the Christmas greeting ‘Feliz Navidad’ one of the small handful of Spanish phrases that virtually every English speaker—not to mention speakers of other languages around the world—knows.

But Feliz Navidad is not the only greeting widely exchanged in the Spanish-speaking world at this time of year. The more ecumenical Felices Fiestas (Happy Holidays) is also commonplace. This may come as a surprise to some who see—and lament—in ‘Happy Holidays’ a bland securalization that they imagine to be a recent departure from a more comfortably dominant Christian culture in the United States, and who might assume that Hispanic/Latin American culture has not experienced a similar trend.

In truth, Felices Fiestas and Feliz Navidad were more or less equivalent in popularity for roughly the first half of the 20th century, with the more overtly religious greeting actually becoming much more widely used since roughly 1970 or 1975. At least, this is the picture that emerges from the literature that Google has scanned and gathered into the remarkable corpus accessible through the Ngram Viewer. In this diagram, Feliz Navidad is in blue and green, andFelices Fiestas in red and yellow.

The phrase Felices Fiestas (Happy Holidays) is not even necessarily secular. After all, the root of Engl. ‘holidays’ is ‘holy days’, and Span. fiestas can refer to religious observances too. For example, a 19th century religious polemic by the Spanish cleric Valentín Mañosa y Arboix, Nuevo triunfo de la verdad católica [The New Triumph of Catholic Truth], proposes the following greeting to be used with fellow Christians one believes to be theologically in error:

“Deseo a V. y compañeros felices fiestas, y que el divino Jesús con su luz eterna disipe las tinieblas del error en que, por desgracia, están Vds. envueltos.” [I wish you and your colleagues happy holidays, and that the divine Jesus with his eternal light may dispel the darkness of error by which, unfortunately, all of you are surrounded.]

Though it must have been satisfying to compose, Father Valentín’s formula has, somehow, not quite caught on as a popular holiday greeting.

In addition to Navidad and las Navidades, Spanish has another way of referring to Christmas, namely las Pascuas de Navidad. The word pascua is most familiar, and most commonly used, for Easter. It derives, through Latinpascha and Greek πάσχα, ultimately from the Hebrew pesach (Passover).

But pascua has an additional meaning, registered this way by the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española [Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy]: “Cada una de las solemnidades del nacimiento de Cristo, del reconocimiento y adoración de los Reyes Magos y de la venida del Espíritu Santo sobre el Colegio Apostólico” (Each of the ecclesiastical festivities of the birth of Christ, His recognition and adoration by the Magi, and the coming of the Holy Spirit over the Apostles.”) In a word: Christmastide.

So, Felices Pascuas de Navidad, or Felices Pascuas for short, is another greeting of the season, particularly widespread in Spain.

Of course, expressing ’Merry Christmas,’ ‘Happy Holidays,’ or ‘Season’s Greetings’ in Spanish as Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas, or Felices Pascuas de Navidad is only part of the broad act of cultural translation that this season brings. The imagery of snow, while more and more a wistful memory in parts of the U.S., is downright fantastic in most of Latin America. There, the reality of Christmastime is summer, swimming trunks, and fireworks—in Lima or Buenos Aires, the Christmas Eve night sky is like a Stateside Fourth of July.

There are other cultural subtleties, as well. Papá Noel and Santa Claus (sometimes spelled Santa Clos) rival one another for the name of the Polar deliverer of gifts. Gifts are generally opened at, or just after, midnight, as opposed to Christmas morning most typical in the U.S. More significantly, the traditional procession of Las Posadas, whose observance is now limited mainly to Mexico and parts of Central America, reenacts Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging.

And in large parts of the Spanish-speaking world, El Día de Reyes (literally ‘Day of the Kings,’ or Epiphany) on Jan. 6, persists as a more traditional Christmastide celebration. Children place shoes (or, in some countries, boxes) outside their doorway as a receptacle for the Wise Men’s presents. Straw and water are left out to feed the camels—we can sense an echo of this custom in the setting out of milk and cookies for Santa and his reindeer.

Observance of Christmas began to increase substantially in Latin America in the 1960s, overwhelming the more traditional Reyes and bringing with it all the Germanic/Nordic iconography of snowfall, evergreens, Santa Claus, and the rest. But Jan. 6 has held on both as a tradition, and in part as a resistance to cultural Americanization.

The really smart kids, of course, celebrate both—the fact that they will collect presents on two occasions less than two weeks apart, of course, being very far from their minds! Felices Fiestas to all, y a todos Happy Holidays from Pablo Julián Davis and Interfluency Translation+Culture.

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.

2011-07-24 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

I want that reporte on my desk first thing Monday morning…!?

Translators between English and Spanish – and no doubt, going from English to virtually any language in the world – often find themselves wrestling with issues like this one: How do I translate Engl. ‘report’? The overwhelmingly clear choice is informe – that’s the ‘castizo’ (correct) word in Spanish. But the temptation to use Sp. reporte is great… it is certainly a recognized word in Spanish, as registered for instance by the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, the main reference work of the institution legally entrusted with the ‘care and feeding’ of the Spanish language around the world. But it is far from universally accepted, it is clearly an importation from English, and its appearance in Spanish is quite recent (the marvelous Google Ngram tool shows it to be essentially a post-WWII phenomenon). Now, does that disqualify it as a Spanish word? Of course not; all languages are built in large measure by borrowings from other tongues.

In a case like this, we need to think carefully about the likely audience or readership, and the word’s probable impact. Is the audience largely composed of Spanish speakers in the US – who of course are the most heavily influenced by English, though far from the only ones ? Even more specifically, is the audience likely to be young? If so, there may be an argument for reporte. Otherwise, the word is probably going to sound jarring.

Other things being equal (though they aren’t always so), if the target language – i.e., the one you’re translating into – has a ‘perfectly good word’ for what you’re trying to express, you should use it (informe is a good example). On the other hand, if your likely audience/readership tends to use another word, imported or adapted from a foreign language (reporte, for instance), you should at least consider it. And if the imported/adapted word is clearly the best and most widely understood way to express something, there should be a strong presumption in its favor: input in the computing sense is moving into this category, though in the figurative sense Sp. insumo or entrada are much preferable.

The bigger picture

If you find yourself upset at the English ‘invasion’ of Spanish, it’s good to take a couple of steps back and look at the historical sweep of how languages grow and change. When a Spanish speaker drops some coins into an alcancía(money-box), stops at the airport aduana (customs) post, or complains of someone’s being mezquino (stingy) – these are all words that entered the language roughly a thousand years ago from Arabic. (For that matter, English speakers draw from Arabic with ‘algebra’, ‘chemical’, ‘divan’, and plenty of other words.) Linguists call them loan-words, oddly, though they’re never returned! English has an enormous stock of words drawn from French, a process that began in earnest with the Norman invasion of 1066 C.E. and has experienced various later waves. Spanish has contributed a considerable wordstock, too, though not nearly so large as French. Think ‘rodeo’, ‘corral’, ‘bronco’, and many other terms. More on this soon.

2011-07-24 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

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Friday thought: Why “See you Monday” ≠ “Hasta el lunes”

The funny Spanish letter with the squiggle on top

Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas, and other greetings of the season

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

I want that reporte on my desk first thing Monday morning…!?

Interfluency, navigating with precision and élan…

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