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2013-09-27 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Hispanic Heritage: Why Spanish Matters

La Mezquita, or Cathedral-Mosque of Córdoba, southern Spain, is considered one of the treasures of humanity and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its majestic geometry embodies the encounter of Africa, Europe, and Asia that unfolded in complex ways in medieval Spain and helped shape the modern Spanish language.

Spanish dominates foreign-language study in the US: 865,000 college students took it in 2009,  followed by French (216,000) and German (96,000). Spanish enrolls more than all other world languages combined. In K-12 public schools, the dominance is even greater: 2007-08 figures showed 6.4 million taking Spanish (72% of all foreign-language enrollment), French a very distant second at 1.3 million.

Why is the “language of Cervantes” so widely studied (if not always mastered)? Here are some of the more common reasons:

A large and growing population. The US’s Spanish-speaking population, over 40 million, surpasses all but a few Latin American countries. Many see Census numbers alone as proving the importance of Spanish and making it “the language to learn.” Not to mention geography: the US shares a border with the most populous Hispanic country in the world, and millions more Spanish speakers live in the Caribbean, not far from Florida’s shores.

Community service.  Idealistic young people in substantial numbers pursue Spanish to serve immigrant community needs such as literacy, health, legal aid, and education, or in missions of faith. In turn, those interactions often become an arena for “service learning” where classroom knowledge of the language is put to the enriching test of real-life experience.

It’s “easy”?  The perception of Spanish as easy to learn is widespread; college students typically see it as the shortcut to meeting language requirements.  It’s a half-truth: Spanish really is a marvel of grammatical and phonetic consistency, due in part to Nebrija’s 1492 Grammar (one of the earliest for a modern language) and the 1713 founding of the Royal Spanish Academy. But true mastery of the language is anything but easy to attain.

It’s “funny”? Fascination with “Spanglish”— incorporation of English words and patterns into immigrant speech—treats as odd the natural result of language contact between populations. In any case, this linguistic resource hardly amounts to a dialect, much less a separate language. Somewhat different is the popularity of “Faux Spanish”: “no problemo”, “perfectamundo”, “mucho macho”, or “el grande jefe” convey a playful, at times mocking, attitude towards Spanish and its speakers.

Laborers. Many North Americans associate Spanish with poorer, often undocumented, immigrants—an understandable perception based on current media and political obsessions, and perhaps personal experience.  In this view, the language is useful to communicate with, and manage, laborers. It’s not really a “serious” language, though: this was actually the message a prestigious private school in Virginia explicitly placed on its website in the recent past, with the boast that for reasons of academic rigor, they proudly offered only French as a foreign language. The same unexamined premise was shared by the judge in an Amarillo, Texas family court who infamously, in August 1995, ordered a Mexican-born immigrant mother to stop speaking in Spanish to her five-year-old daughter, as using that language constituted “child abuse” and would condemn the girl to a future “as a housemaid.” (Both the school and the judge did later about-faces in the light of avalanches of public criticism.)

A “quaint” culture.  It’s common to hear people express love for the culture, often in terms of salsa (cuisine) and salsa (music and dance).  Adjectives such as “colorful,” “quaint,” simple”, and “exotic” paint a Hispanic world of peasants, rural and village life, “traditions”. This view can unintentionally place Hispanic or Latino people in a primitive past, even outside of time. An associated perception sees Spanish as the language of places college students on Spring break and other tourists go to run wild, places—many of them—that the United States once conquered, occupied, or dominated. Indeed, this is the other side of the coin from language-of-manual-laborers. A long history of power relations has planted such deeply-rooted habits of thought.

Quite a mix of reasons (and it’s only a sampling)! Sincere interest in other cultures is there, as are a calling to service, faith, and love of justice. So, too, are simplistic romanticization, patronizing superiority, and power agendas.

Here are some other, crucial reasons why Spanish matters and why learning it is one of the best things you can do in the early 21st century:

A global language. Spanish now ranks second in the world in number of native speakers, with over 410 million (approximately 1 in 20 members of the human race), trailing only Mandarin Chinese. English, with over 360 million worldwide, is in third place, right behind (though when we add the number of people who speak English as a second language, it moves into second place). Portuguese, which I like to call Spanish’s “fraternal twin”—no living language is nearly so close a relation to English—has over 220 million native speakers, mostly in rising economic powerhouse Brazil; Spanish speakers can understand Portuguese to a considerable degree and have an automatic head-start in learning the language.

Economic power. The US’s 53 million Hispanics (1 in 6 people!) spend some $1.3 trillion annually; Spanish-speaking countries’ combined GDP, $3.4 trillion, equals industrial giant Germany; add sister nation Brazil, and at $5.9 trillion it matches Japan. There are countless markets to sell to, jobs to be done, texts to be translated, by people with significant mastery of the language (inseparable, in the end, from cultural understanding).

A world civilization.  Every language bears witness to a people’s experience and creativity.  For Spanish that includes ancient Iberian, Celtic, Roman, and Germanic legacies, as well as the unique Rom or ‘Gypsy’ presence (Spanish gitanos, a word derived from egiptanos and bearing witness to the passage of part of that wandering people into North Africa via Egypt); a near-millennium of Christian-Jewish-Muslim coexistence; the world’s first global empire; and, today, twenty multicultural societies of indigenous, African, European, and Asian heritage.  Just one example of the cultural richness that Spanish embodies: in societies viewed as overwhelmingly Christian, one says ¡Ojalá! (Arabic Inshallah) for “I hope so!”

The Knight of the Woeful Countenance. Likely the world’s best-known and loved work of fiction, Cervantes’s Don Quixote crowns a literature that includes the brilliant 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; the greatest of modern stylists, José Martí, who died fighting for Cuban independence; Chile’s beloved poet Pablo Neruda, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges with his metaphysical mysteries, and master storytellers of our lifetime like Colombia’s García Márquez, Peru’s Vargas Llosa, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Chile’s Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez of the Dominican Republic.

Recovering one’s own heritage.  Significant numbers of US-born (or raised) Hispanics are English-dominant, even monolingual (note that the Hispanic/Latino population, at 53 million, is larger than the Spanish-speaking figure of 40 million). For “heritage learners,” as the language-teaching profession calls those who grew up with significant home exposure to Spanish, learning it can be a powerful reclaiming of family and cultural legacy.

An outlook on life.  To master Spanish is to learn another way of being in the world, a peculiar combination of seriousness, humor, hierarchy, and dignity. The native English speaker learns to tuck away that ever-present, imperial pronoun “I” (the only one English capitalizes!), taking on a more sparingly-used yo: Spanish embodies a certain modesty.  One learns words for relationships and customs English can’t name: compadre or comadre if you’re their kid’s godparent, tocayo if you share the same name, sobremesa for staying at the table talking after a meal.  Saying Nos vemos mañana (See you tomorrow), one often adds si Dios quiere (God willing): a small linguistic bow to the Deity, or simply to life’s unknowns.

There are many valid reasons to learn Spanish; it’s fine as preparation for a Cancun vacation or to improve HR.  But a global economic force, a major world literature, and the quest for genuine intercultural fluency offer other motivations that can be mind-expanding, even life-changing.

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

Pablo J. Davis provides professionally-certified translation/interpreting services, and cultural coaching, through Interfluency.com. He has formal graduate training in Latin American History. A version of this article was published by The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) on Fri., Sep. 27, 2013.

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2013-01-05 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Educación: education and upbringing

Dear reader,

Last week, we saw how the English expression “Congratulations!” is separated by Spanish into “Felicitaciones!” for a success vs. “¡Felicidades!” on life passages (marriage, birth of a child, New Year).

Similarly, Spanish ser and estar distinguish essence (Es mi hija, She is my daughter) from state  (Está ansiosa por algo, She is anxious about something); English has only “to be”. You “know” 3×3=9 and you “know” someone: Spanish saber and conocer, respectively. A “fish” is pez in the water but pescado on your plate.

In Spanish, educación can mean two things, represented by the photographs above. English “education” only pertains to the left side. Photo on left, photographer unknown, from Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones Mexicanas (www.inehrm.gob.mx); photo on right, origin unknown. Both appear to be from the 1950′s.

 

But it isn’t always the language of Cervantes that makes the finer distinctions; in other cases, it’s Shakespeare’s that does so.

Take Spanish educación.  Like English “education”., it can mean formal study. But it’s also what parents strive to inculcate in their children—in surface matters (saying “thank you” and “please”) and deeper ones (respect, gratitude, kindness).  Manners and values: what English expresses by the word “upbringing” or, more popularly, “raising”.

To be called maleducado (literally: badly educated) is to be thought ill-mannered, disrespectful, selfish, or vulgar.  

This second meaning of educación is probably the more important one in Spanish.  To hear the expression “un hombre educado” (literally, an educated man) is chiefly to think of manners, values, character.

“Education starts in the home” is a widely shared view these days. In some ways, we can say that the Spanish wordeducación already contains this idea.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the January 13, 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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2013-01-01 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Two kinds of congratulations… and how Spanish expresses them

Dear reader,

For some weeks now, the air has been filled with greetings and good wishes: “Happy Holidays”, “Merry Christmas,” “Season’s Greetings” and, for a few days yet, “Happy New Year”.  In Spanish: Felices Fiestas, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Año Nuevo.

There’s one Spanish greeting, though, that English can’t quite reproduce: “¡Felicidades!”

Many English speakers (and even some native Spanish speakers) confuse this interjection with the similar-sounding “¡Felicitaciones!” English routinely expresses both ideas by the single word: “Congratulations!”

The felicitaciones/felicidades pair offers a beautiful example of the subtle shades of meaning that a language (in this case, Spanish) can express.

The distinction is significant: felicitación is an act of praise or congratulation, while felicidad refers to that sublime and blessed state of the human heart, happiness.

Thus a graduation, a promotion, an award, indeed any achievement or victory, merits a congratulatory“¡Felicitaciones!” (An alternative particularly common in Spain: “¡Enhorabuena!”)

On the other hand, transcendent moments of the human condition, the annual cycle, or the great life passages—the birth of a child, a birthday, a wedding, or, indeed, a New Year—inspire the warmer and more elevated“¡Felicidades!”: a wish for much happiness.

It’s fascinating to speculate on the cultural source of this distinction, absent from English. Is Spanish more emotive? Perhaps. We propose, instead, that the answer lies in a stronger sense of ritual and ceremony in the tongue of Cervantes.

¡Buenas palabras… y felicidades!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the January 6, 2013edition 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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2012-11-26 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Machos, males and he-men

Dear reader,

The recent, tragic death of seven-time champion boxer Héctor “Macho” Camacho has filled headlines around the world, and put on many tongues a word that was the nickname of the great prizefighter from Bayamón, Puerto Rico—and is a popular nickname throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

The meaning of macho in Spanish, biologically, is simply “male”. The Spanish and English words both derive from the Latin masculus.

Héctor Luis Camacho Matías, El “Macho” Camacho, native of Bayamón, Puerto Rico and holder, at different times, of seven different championship belts.

 

Macho is also widely used in the Spanish-speaking world as an appellative, as in “¿Cómo estás, macho?”(“How are you, man?”).The term is also the main way to designate almost any male animal.  For instance:víbora macho (male snake), ardilla macho (male squirrel), gato macho (male cat).  English is rich in equivalents. Besides the formal, biologically literal “male”, as in “male rabbit”, there is a wealth of folk terms like “jack rabbit”,  “tomcat”, “billy goat”. Other common terms for male: “buck” (deer, antelope, ferret, squirrel, etc.), “bull” (moose, hippopotamus, elephant, shark, seal), and “cock” (hawk, turkey, pheasant, indeed almost any bird).

Curiously, the English word “macho”, taken directly from Spanish, means not simply male but rather hypermasculine, very virile or aggressive. “Macho man”, technically (but not actually) redundant, is also widely used; readers over 40 or 50 years old will recall the humorous title of The Village People’s 1978 song.  These uses, documented in English for at least a century and a half, have grown dramatically since the 1960s. Not to mention “machismo” to mean hypermasculinity or male chauvinism, appearing around 1970 (in Spanish it dates roughly to 1900).

Given the word’s connotations in their language, many English speakers aren’t aware that Spanish macho refers simply to the male gender, as when a baby boy is born and people say “Salió macho“. That is, the word that in one language just means “male” is taken by members of another linguistic community to express an extreme version of masculinity.

Interesting (though not necessarily a reason for Hispanic pride) that the English language owes this word to Spanish!

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2012 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the December 9, 2012 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.

Pablo Julián Davis is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, English>Spanish, and Certified by the Supreme Court as an Interpreter, English<>Spanish. He delivers world-class translation and interpreting, as well as inspiring and interactive cultural training, through his company Interfluency Translation+Culture. He can be reached at pablo@interfluency.com.

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2012-11-22 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Thanksgiving: translating the name, tracing the meaning(s)

The fourth Thursday in November is here, and with it a holiday largely peculiar to the United States, yet at the same time universal in its origins as a harvest celebration. Thanksgiving Day, or, in Spanish, Día de Acción de Gracias.

Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting, Freedom From Want, used an idealized scene of a family Thanksgiving meal to illustrate one of the “Four Freedoms” enunciated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the values for which the country was at war.

As an annual celebration, it can be traced back continuously not to the early 17th century and the first encounters between English colonists and Massachusetts natives, but rather to 1863, in the midst of the US Civil War. Before then, various presidents had declared a Day of Thanksgiving in certain years, but it was not an annual ritual. In fact, the third president, Thomas Jefferson, had declined entirely to do so, believing it a violation of the separation of church and state for the chief executive to urge prayer on the citizenry.

To many ears, Día de Acción de Gracias has the ring of merely an awkward, too-literal translation of the English name. Other versions can be found in the Spanish-speaking world: Día de las Gracias(Day of Thanks), Día de Gracias (Day of Thanks, more briefly expressed), and even the tongue-in-cheek Día del Pavo (Turkey Day).

In fact, acción de graciasis the Spanish term (as is ”thanksgiving” in English), in both Catholic and Protestant traditions, for a special Mass or service, as well as a prayer of thanks to God.  In other words, long before the invention of this holiday in the United States, a theological and liturgical concept existed, along with a personal religious practice, of that name.

“A Soldier’s Thanksgiving” was the Saturday Evening Post’s cover for Dec. 8, 1917, the US’s first year of direct involvement in the ‘Great War’. J.C. Leyendecker was the artist. The military connection with Thanksgiving is one of the holiday’s many facets.

 

In English, the phrase to say grace (as before a meal) used to be in the plural: before Shakespeare’s time, one spoke of graces, whose meaning was simply the giving of thanks.  That older plural mirrors exactly the Spanish use, as it still exists: gracias.

In the English colonies, some years saw the authorities (whether civil or religious) declare a Day of Thanksgiving marked by prayers and feasting. In certain other years, in which bad harvests, plagues, or other misfortunes were understood to be signs of divine wrath at the community, leaders decreed days of penitence and fasting.

This mix of gratitude and humility was reflected in the later presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving, from the Civil War forward. Along with thanks to God, it was customary to express regret for national errors and a desire to mend our ways.  (An earlier proclamation, from George Washington in 1789, urged the people to “unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions . . . “) Somehow, by the last quarter of the 20th century, it no longer occurred to US presidents to include such a note of remorse.

The Thanksgiving holiday has assumed the widest imaginable range of forms throughout its history, and from region to region. A few examples will serve to illustrate. In the South, the day was, historically, strongly linked to hunting by the menfolk, and later an association arose with football. In New York City until well after 1900, it was a Carnavalesque occasion with more than a hint of Halloween, in which groups of children and youths masked and costumed in the raiments of poverty or danger would wander the streets of the city demanding treats from residents and passers-by, under threat of playing tricks. This sort of urban mischief led to a movement to tame or soften the holiday, making of it a tribute to middle-class domesticity. And the symbolic inclusion of members of the armed forces posted overseas, especially in wartime, has been a feature of every Thanksgiving going back to the war with Spain in 1898.

Giant balloon of the Tin Man character from The Wizard of Oz (a novelty, as the movie had premiered just the year before), Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York City, 1940. Commercialism has been a feature of Thanksgiving for at least a century.

 

In addition to its diverse forms of celebration, the holiday has always generated the most varied interpretations and meanings. On the one hand, it elicits the affection of many people for its lack of commercialism, and for the absence of material gift-giving from its rituals: quite the contrary, its center is occupied by a meal shared with family, friends, and persons alone or in need. Nevertheless, for over a hundred years now, Thanksgiving (or at least the day immediately after) has been understood to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Leading department stores began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in the early 20th century (Macy’s became the most famous, but wasn’t the first, an honor reserved for Gimbel’s parade which debuted in Philadelphia in 1920).

The holiday has also been widely seen as essentially religious in character: the thanks are given to God. Another perspective, though, is one of a more diffuse sort of gratitude, whether towards nature, one’s parents, or others. This debate is impossible to resolve: the remotest origins are doubtless religious, as Jefferson understood in opposing the idea of  a presidential proclamation. At the same time, the ever-changing, protean nature of the holiday has made of it, just as clearly, a celebration that is to a great extent secular.

Another contradiction relates to Native Americans or, as most of them prefer to call themselves, American Indians. On the hand, we note a widespread belief that Thanksgiving Day is, at least in part, an occasion of gratitude towards the native inhabitants who helped the earliest colonists survive the harsh winter in a land of whose agriculture they were utterly ignorant. On the other hand, there are those who see the holiday as an affirmation of the conquest of the American Indian and even a ritual sacrifice in which the turkey symbolizes the original human inhabitants.

The modern origin of Thanksgiving Day during the Civil War, and by the hand of President Lincoln, offers a clue for understanding another peculiarity of the holiday: its rejection, into the early decades of the 20th century, by much of the South as a Yankee imposition. Even earlier, abolitionists had used Thanskgiving as an occasion for sermons against slavery.  These antecedents together helped solidify a long-standing Southern White disdain for the holiday, in the past.

Another vital connotation of Thanksgiving Day is that of homecoming. For a people as mobile as that of the United States, the holiday had by the middle of the 19th century become the occasion for the reencounter of the country’s scattered sons and daughters with the homes of their childhood and with now aged parents.  Currier & Ives’s famous lithograph of 1867, Home to Thanksgiving, made this association visually memorable. The homecoming theme, more broadly, is presented with both comedy and pathos in the 1987 feature film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, viewing of which has become a staple of the holiday in many homes.

Currier and Ives’s famous lithograph from 1867, crystallizes in its snowy, rural scene a notion deeply rooted in the culture of the United States: Thanksgiving as an occasion for a restlessly mobile, scattered population to return to the family homestead.

 

The endless debates about the origins of Thanksgiving Day underscore its importance as a national festival.  Symbolically, it’s understood as a performance of the very beginnings of colonization, which it ritually reenacts. Massachusetts, Maine, Florida, and other states (then colonies) dispute over where “the first Thanksgiving” happened.  This search for a genesis is a chimera. For thanksgiving, with a small ‘t’, is a gesture whose origins are lost in the mists of time. One might as well search for the first embrace, or the first wedding.  Anyway, none of the various thanksgiving feasts that occurred in this or that colony can show an uninterrupted continuity up to the present national celebration.

Today, despite its diverse and sometimes contradictory facets, Thanksgiving Day remains an indispensable date on the country’s calendar. And, as the turkey tamales, turkey curry, turkey paella, and countless other variants bear witness on millions of family tables, the holiday has proven singularly supple in its ability to welcome and incorporate generation after generation of immigrants.

Here Disney combines the sentimental “thanks, Native Americans” approach to Thanksgiving with some good, old-fashioned cheesecake.

 

Sentimentally, but with much truth, it has been said that Thanksgiving Day is a kind of national communion. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine another day of the year devoted, for almost every one of the more than 300 million who live in the United States, to a single, shared activity. The elements of simplicity, homecoming, and unity-in-diversity that mark El Día de Acción de Gracias would seem to assure its continued relevance in national culture.Copyright ©2012 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.

Pablo Julián Davis is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, English>Spanish, and Certified by the Supreme Court as an Interpreter, English<>Spanish. He delivers world-class translation and interpreting, as well as inspiring and interactive cultural training, through his company Interfluency Translation+Culture. He can be reached at pablo@interfluency.com.

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2012-11-18 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: To translate or not to translate – DREAMers

Dear readers,

The 2012 presidential election underscored the active influence of people of Latin American origin on the political, not to mention the social, cultural, and economic life, of the United States.

Against this backdrop, a social movement has been born: young Hispanics/Latinos, brought to the US as children via informal immigration (to persist in calling it “illegal” flies in the face of logic, not to mention basic decency), now dream of college study, work, and access to all the possibilities of a full life.

Signs at a march in favor of the DREAM Act. Note the verbatim allusion in the middle sign to the famous phrase pronounced by Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 Poor People’s March on Washington.

 

Why do they call themselves “Dreamers” and not the Spanish Soñadores?

All languages import foreign words. English “passport” comes from French, “hoosegow” from Spanishjuzgado. Thinking of the recent hurricane, “levee” is French in origin, “dike” Dutch.

Spanish took English input, French menú, Arabic alcohol, Náhuatl tomate (the last three entered English, too).

They’re “loan words” but, oddly, are never returned!

Some linguists classify loans either as legitimate, supplying a void in the borrowing language (English had no way to say “alcohol” other than to use the Arabic word, and Spanish likewise), or as “barbarisms” made unnecessary by the prior existence of an equivalent word or words (why use chauffeur when we already had “driver”?). But the foreign word, far from being unnecessary, tends to offer, usefully, a different tone or connotation.

This helps us understand “Dreamers”. First, the movement seeks passage of the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act; that name, with its patriotic undertones, makes sense on petitions and protest signs.

And what could be more natural for a generation growing up in the US and steeped in its culture, than to tap the inspiration and emotional power of the term “American Dream”— not to mention the echoes of Dr. King’s immortal phrase.  The logic underlying this use of “Dreamers” is compelling. Sometimes, we translate best by not translating.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

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

A version of this essay, together with its English-language version, was originally written for La Prensa Latina(Memphis, Tennessee), appearing in the 9 Sept. 2012 edition. It was part of the weekly column entitled Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traduccion.

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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.

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

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

Dear readers,

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

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

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

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

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

¡Buenas palabras!

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

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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.

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