Julián

2016-03-26 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Lunary language and lore

Dear reader,

This past week brought not only a full moon (Span. luna llena, or, in a graceful Latin form, plenilunio), but also a penumbral lunar eclipse. And as far removed as most of us city folk are from the country and the spell the night sky used to cast on humanity, our companion orb has not lost the power to stun us with its beauty.

Human language testifies to the profound imprint that Earth’s satellite has made on human consciousness. We’ll look very briefly at some of that testimony, mainly in English and Spanish.

penumbral lunar eclipse march 2016 The odd chance that Sun (Sol) and Moon (Luna) appear the same size in the earthly sky, has surely reinforced human cultures’ seeing them as a pair representing male/female, gold/silver, night/day. The moon-female tie runs deep: the lunar phases find an echo in woman’s menstrual cycle.

The moon has its day: Engl. “Monday” (Ger. Montag, Dan. mandag), Span. lunes (Fr. lundi, It. lunedì). It also gives us “month”; Span. mes is from Lat. mensis, a root visible in words like “bi-mensual.”

Another link: moon and madness, yields Engl. “lunatic” and Span. Lunático. But English informalizes it with “looney” and “looney tunes” (from the old cartoon series); “looney bin” is a mental hospital.

English also uses “moon” for “to languish sadly” (as one pining for a lost or unrequited love), which is a slightly archaic usage, and “to show one’s bared buttocks,” which isn’t.

Sp. lunar (loo-NAR) is also “birthmark,” once thought caused by the Moon’s influence, or “polka dot” on clothing. Spanish calls a landing on the Moon an alunizaje (by analogy to aterrizaje on Earth).

“Moonlight” (Sp. claro de luna, Fr. claire de lune) has a power over young lovers, long understood (and abetted) by poets and songwriters.

Samuel Johnson’s Sermon XII movingly uses the lovely, archaic word “sublunary” for “earthly”—urging his listeners “to bid farewell to sublunary vanities” and instead “with pure heart and steady faith to ‘fear God and keep his commandments.’”

¡Buenas palabras! Good words!

Pablo

An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in the Nov. 27-Dec. 3, 2015 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as number 158 in the weekly bilingual column, “Misterios y Engimas de la Traducción/Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (Aamerican Translators Association) Certified Translator, Engl>Span; a Tennessee State Courts Certified Interpreter, Engl<>Span; and an innovative trainer in the fields of translation, interpreting, and intercultural competency, with over 25 years experience. He holds the doctorate in Latin American History from The Johns Hopkins University, and is a Juris Doctor Candidate at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, University of Memphis (May 2017).

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.

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.

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.

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

“Yours truly” and other linguistic gestures of modesty

Dear reader,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

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

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

The riddle of “fish”

Dear reader,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good words!

Pablo

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

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

Two little letters, a translator’s riddle

Dear reader,

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

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

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

But that little pronoun me certainly complicates things.

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

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

Good words!

Pablo

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

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

Happy Birthday, Jorge Washington

Dear reader,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. This essay was originally written for the 17 February 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column entitled “Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción”/”Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (English>Spanish) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Court Interpreter (English<>Spanish).

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

Did you see the Cuervos win Super Tazón XLVII?

Dear reader,

For the Spanish-speaking world, the game in which the champion of a league or tournament is decided is known as la final.

In the United States, where P.R. is an art and a science, baseball since 1901 has had its “World Series”, a somewhat immodest name.

And for nearly a half-century now, the NFL’s final game has been known as the Super Bowl. Further marketing brilliance: numbering them with roman numerals: last Sunday’s edition was Super Bowl XLVII… letters that announce an event of historical, or imperial, dimensions.

“Bowl” originally meant just a stadium (first, apparently, was Yale’s), due to the hemispheric, amphitheater shape.

Beginning in 1923, the term names a championship game, the Rose Bowl. The Sugar Bowl and Cotton Bowl followed, and dozens more; and in the ‘60s, the NFL’s Super Bowl. (Curiously, the first two Super Bowls, in which the Green Bay Packers defeated first the Kansas City Chiefs and then the Oakland Raiders, were not called by that name; the term “Super Bowl,” and the corresponding roman numerals, were applied retroactively in 1969, the year the New York Jets shocked the sports world by defeating the mighty and heavily-favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.)

Spanish-language contact with American football is recent; only in the ‘80s did Super Tazón come into use: tazón,augmentative of taza (cup), refers to a deep plate or bowl. But Super Tazón is not nearly as widely used in Spanish as the direct calque from English, “Super Bowl”, with its prestige and powerful connotations.

Both Super Bowl teams’ names have a Hispanic connection: the Ravens (Cuervos), allusion to Edgar Allan Poe, who deeply influenced Spanish American literature, and the Forty-Niners (almost never translated into Spanish), reference to the Gold Rush that descended on California after Guadalupe Hidalgo, the treaty that ended the US-Mexican War.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the Feb. 10-16 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column “Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción/Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (English>Spanish) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Court Interpreter for Spanish and English.

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

Spanish on the Map/El español en el mapa

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

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

Free Public Lecture by Dr. Pablo J. Davis

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

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

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

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

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

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

2013-01-20 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Danger! “Notario Público” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Dear reader,

Many of the words we explore in this column have to do with everyday culture: yapa and “lagniappe”; “¡Felicidades!”and “¡Felicitaciones!” as two varieties of congratulation; the nearly untranslatable piropo.

Much of our translation work, in contrast, is legal in nature: contracts, wills, powers of attorney, lawsuits.

Typical notary stamp in the US. The mistranslation of the title into Spanish as notario is not only incorrect, but potentially dangerous.

In that work, it’s common to have to translate the title “notary public”.

“Notary”: what a trap that word lays for the unwary!

Because the obvious, direct translation to notario or notario público is wrong.

It’s a “false friend”, linguists’ term for words with similar appearance and origins but different meanings.Thus Spanish fábrica (factory) is not fabric, a sentencia(ruling, judgment) is not a sentence (punishment), a compromiso (commitment) no compromise.

In Spanish-speaking countries, notarios (they’re público by definition, as the position requires government authorization) are lawyers specialized in legalization of documents and related matters. In Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the title is escribano.

US notaries are not attorneys; the requirements to become one are minimal.

Thus the frequent mistranslation of “notary” as notario can, in effect, mislead Spanish speakers into thinking of these officials as attorneys.

In fact, this erroneous direct translation is expressly prohibited by law in various states, including Texas and Florida.

Our general recommendation is to translate “notary” as fedatario, the Spanish term for an official authorized to attest to the legitimacy of signatures and oaths.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the January 27, 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.

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Lunary language and lore

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

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

“Yours truly” and other linguistic gestures of modesty

The riddle of “fish”

Two little letters, a translator’s riddle

Happy Birthday, Jorge Washington

Did you see the Cuervos win Super Tazón XLVII?

Spanish on the Map/El español en el mapa

Danger! “Notario Público” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

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