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interpreting

2013-11-21 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

How to work with an interpreter

If you’re a patient or physician, attorney or client, it’s quite probable that at one time or another you’ll use the services of a foreign-language interpreter. Some ideas and suggestions to keep in mind:

  1. An interpreter converts spoken dialogue from one language to another, a translator with written text. Two separate professions, two distinct sets of skills (though there are professionals who perform both, at a high level).
  2. Whenever possible, use the services of a professional interpreter certified by one of the following: Legal: The Supreme Court of your state (Certified is the highest level, while Registered means the person has not passed all of the required examinations), the Federal Courts, or NAJIT. Medical: IMIA, CCHI, or NBCMI. (The ATA certifies translators.) These certifications represent an important level of reliability and professionalism. And they can be verified; falsely claiming certification is fraud—an illegal act.
  3. It’s very common for bilingual children or friends to be used as interpreters. In legal and medical matters particularly, this is not advisable. There’s too much at stake to leave things in amateur hands. And there are issues that minor children should not be hearing and interpreting.
  4. Though it doesn’t feel natural, make every effort to look into the eyes of the person you’re talking to, of addressing them directly as “you”—almost as if the interpreter weren’t there. The interpreter is part of the interaction, facilitating your conversation, but is not part of the conversation, so you shouldn’t look at the interpreter and say, “Tell the doctor that…”  The interpreter must use the first person, “I” (Spanish yo) except when speaking for him or herself, and then it’s the third person: “The interpreter wishes to clarify…”
  5. There are two main modes of interpreting: consecutive and simultaneous. In consecutive, an individual speaks, then pauses while the interpreter interprets what was just said. If you’re using consecutive interpreting, it’s important that you keep your sentences short, so that the interpreter can be as accurate and complete as possible. If you’re stating numbers, addresses, or dates, say them slowly. In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter conveys what’s being said in “real time”; a skilled professional interpreter can keep up with the pace of the person, or persons, for whom he or she is interpreting, usually with just 1 or 2 seconds’ delay.
  6. Interpreting is one of the most complex activities the human brain can perform. The pressure on the interpreter is great, especially in the legal and medical fields, and is mentally and physically exhausting. Respect the interpreter’s need for breaks (or the interpreters’ need, if the interaction is lengthy and there is more than one interpreter assigned to it), not just out of concern for that person’s health, but also in order to assure the highest possible level of work.
  7. If you’re unsure a word was interpreted (translated) correctly, just politely ask to go back to it.
  8. If the interpreter pauses to ask a question or get clarification of a particular point, don’t be alarmed: almost always, that is a sign of professionalism.
  9. If the interpreter’s utterances are significantly shorter, or longer, than those of the persons being interpreted, there could be a problem. The interpreter is not supposed to give a summary of what was said, nor embellish or add to it. It’s not a matter of the word count or timing being exactly the same, but the length and degree of detail between the original language and the interpreter’s version should be roughly comparable.

Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT, has more than 25 years of professional experience as interpreter and translator. As an interpreter, he is Certified by the Supreme Court of Tennessee and has passed the Federal Courts’ Written Examination. He performs varied interpreting work, with a legal/judicial specialization as well as work in medical and other fields. As a conference interpreter, he has worked with distinguished world personalities including Rigoberta Menchu Tum (Nobel Peace Prize laureate), theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz, journalist David Bacon, the late writer Julio Cortázar, and others.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: Certified Translator, interpretation, intérprete, interpreter, interpreting, Memphis, traducción, traductor, traductor certificado, translation

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

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

by Pablo J. Davis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", bilingual, certificado, certified, cross-cultural, cultura, culture, Davis, Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, English, español, Halloween, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, interpretación, intérprete, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

2013-08-13 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Tuesday the 13th… the Friday the 13th of the Spanish-speaking world (and vice-versa)

ENLACE AQUI PARA ESPAÑOL/LINK HERE FOR SPANISH

Imagine you’re translating a document, from English into Spanish. Say it’s a letter, dated Tuesday, August 13, 2013 (that’s today).  How do you translate that into Spanish? Well, that’s not too difficult: you might render it as ‘martes, 13 agosto 2013’.

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

(Like November 2012, the month of January 1931 had 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. Molina Campos was admired by Walt Disney, with whom he struck up a friendship.)

The bad luck commonly held to attach to ‘martes 13’ actually comes in a double dose. To the triskaidekafobia (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 2012 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.

© Copyright 2013 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.

A version of this essay appeared at https://interfluency.wordpress.com on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011 and Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012.

Pablo J. Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, English>Spanish, and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter, English<>Spanish. With over 20 years of experience and particular specialties in the legal, business, and medical fields. Contact info@interfluency.com or 901-288-3018 if you need world-class translation or interpreting between the English and Spanish languages. Through his company Interfluency Translation+Culture, he aso delivers interactive, informative, and inspiring cultural-awareness training to businesses, churches, schools, and government agencies.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", 13th, America, American, bilingual, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, dates, Davis, days, English-Spanish, español, fear, Friday, Friday the 13th, hispana, Hispano, inglés, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, language, Latin, Latin American, martes, Martes 13, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, superstition, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, Tuesday, week

2013-03-26 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Translation and interpreting: two different professions

Dear reader,

Someone who asks, “Could you translate what that man is saying?” is understood. But the request is really  to “interpret”.

The famed School of Translators of Toledo, 16th century

 

A translator converts the sense of a text from the language in which it’s written or printed, into another language; interpreters do something equivalent, but far from identical, with spoken language.

“Translate” comes from Latin: trans- (across, from one side to the other) and latus (carried); the Spanish (and numerous other languages’) equivalent, traducir, has a different Latin origin using ducere (to guide or lead).

The derivation of “interpret” is quite different: inter(between) and pret (business, negotiation, price), thus, an intermediary. A small but key point: the correct noun for the activity is “interpreting” (“interpretation” has other meanings that can cause confusion).

Translator and interpreter: two distinct professions, and not all practitioners of the one can do the other well. Some differences:

* Translation is usually unidirectional (into the translator’s native language), solitary, primarily intellectual-cognitive, takes much time but is not done in “real time”.

* Interpreting goes in both linguistic directions, is inherently social or public, less consciously cognitive than intuitive, must be done almost instantaneously and in the flow of the spoken language: a kind of performance.

Both are difficult, requiring much knowledge, experience, subtlety, and judgment.

As to the relationship with time, the translator is something like a painter or sculptor, the interpreter like an actor or dancer.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. This essay was originally written for the 31 March 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as part of the weekly bilingual column, “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", culture, English, interpretación, interpretation, interpreting, Memphis translator, Pablo Davis, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, Tennessee translator, traducción, translation

2012-11-13 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Tuesday the 13th… the Friday the 13th of the Spanish-speaking world (and vice-versa)

ENLACE AQUI PARA ESPAÑOL/LINK HERE FOR SPANISH

Imagine you’re translating a document, from English into Spanish. Say it’s a letter, dated Tuesday, November 13, 2012 (that’s today).  How do you translate that into Spanish? Well, that’s not too difficult: you’d render it as ‘martes, 13 noviembre 2012’.

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

 

(Like November 2012, the month of January 1931 had 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. Molina Campos was admired by Walt Disney, with whom he struck up a friendship.)

The bad luck commonly held to attach to ‘martes 13’ actually comes in a double dose. To the triskaidekafobia (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 2012 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.

© Copyright 2012 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.

A version of this essay appeared at https://interfluency.wordpress.com on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011.

Pablo J. Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, English>Spanish, and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter, English<>Spanish. With over 20 years of experience, he has particular specialties in the legal, business, and medical fields. Contact info@interfluency.com or 901-288-3018 if you need world-class translation or interpreting between the English and Spanish languages. His company Interfluency Translation+Culture also delivers interactive, informative, and inspiring cultural-awareness training to businesses, churches, schools, and government agencies.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", 13th, America, American, bilingual, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, dates, Davis, days, English-Spanish, español, fear, Friday, Friday the 13th, hispana, Hispano, inglés, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, language, Latin, Latin American, martes, Martes 13, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, superstition, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, Tuesday, week

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

Is Día de los Muertos the Mexican Halloween?

Grinning skulls, jangling skeletons… candies, cakes, and other sweets… Halloween is almost upon us, and so too is the festival known in Mexico as ‘Día de los Muertos’ or more simply ‘Día de Muertos’.  They are just two days apart: in 2012, Halloween falls on a Wednesday (Oct.31) and el Día de los Muertos –  often rendered in  English as ‘the (Mexican) Day of the Dead’ – on Friday (Nov.2).  Surely they are two near-identical cultural equivalents! Surely they ‘translate‘ clearly and correctly one to the other!

But do they really? Just as the Spanish word ‘amigo’ (or ‘amiga’) and English ‘friend’ may be side-by-side in bilingual dictionaries, yet tend to mean quite different things to the people using them – and the same can be said for familia/family, fiesta/party, and countless other culturally significant word pairs – so Halloween and Día de los Muertos share some key symbols and the time of year but are radically different phenomena.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, the wholeness and acceptance in the face of mortality, and the imperative of sustaining connection with loved ones no longer living, that are the heart of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos form a thread that runs through much of Latin America’s cultural map. Argentina’s Atahualpa Yupanqui, wrote half a century ago in his memorable anthem, ‘Los hermanos’:

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

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

. . .

Y así, seguimos andando                And so we go on,
curtidos de soledad.                        Hardened by loneliness
Y en nosotros nuestros muertos  And inside us, we carry our dead
pa que nadie quede atrás.              So that nobody’s left behind

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

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

Copyright ©2011-2012 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.
This essay originally appeared at http://interfluency.wordpress.com in October 2011. It is being republished this year with  an accompanying Spanish translation.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", bilingual, certificado, certified, cross-cultural, cultura, culture, Davis, Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, English, español, Halloween, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, interpretación, intérprete, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

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

2012-10-17 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation: You say “tamal”, I say “tamale”

Dear readers,

Tamales have been a favorite food in the US for over a century.  Oddly, Spanish tamal is generally not used in the singular—English speakers tend to say “a tamale”.

This use is so widespread, especially in the phrase “hot tamale” (already a favorite item for sale from roadside stands and urban street vendors before the First World War), that it must be considered the correct English singular.

Another common phrase, “a (real) hot tamale”, describes a physically attractive woman, with a likely added connotation of sparkling, magnetic personality.

Why does English use this “incorrect” singular?

One hypothesis: English speakers inferred from the Spanish plural tamales that the singular must be formed by removing final ‘s’ (the English rule). Linguists call this “back-formation”; it’s how the verb “televise” arose from “television”, or “gruntled” as a humorous opposite of “disgruntled”.

The other possibility: the indigenous (Nahuatl) singular,tamalli, was widely used in old Mexican North/US Southwest Spanish dialect; Anglos might have picked up “tamale” that way.

But retroformation is highly likely.  It’s what’s behind “a frijole” (instead of frijol), for instance.

The process occurs in all languages. In medieval Spanish, Sant’Iago (Saint James) became Santiago; retroformation led people to believe the saint’s name was Tiago (San Tiago).  From there came the “invention” of the name Diego, highly popular today.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

PS For a further reflection on “tamale” vs tamal, please click here.

A version of this essay first appeared in La Prensa Latina, Memphis, Tennessee, on 23 Sept. 2012.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: back-formation, borrowings, certified, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, English, English-Spanish, español, Hispanic, Hispano, hot, hot tamale, influence, inglés, Interfluency, interlinguistic, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, language, Latin American, Latino, linguistic, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, retroformación, tamal, tamal or tamale, tamale, tamales, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

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.

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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.

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