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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:

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).
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.
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.
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…”
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.
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.
If you’re unsure a word was interpreted (translated) correctly, just politely ask to go back to it.
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.
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.

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.

2013-06-15 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Translating “bird” into Spanish

Dear reader,

E.G., a native English-speaking friend who’s quite proficient in Spanish, asked about the differences between aveand pájaro in translating “bird”.

For starters, both originate in Latin: avis and passer (sparrow), respectively.

How do the two Spanish words divvy up the turf of meaning—what linguists call the “semantic field”

Sparrow and ostrich: in Spanish both birds are aves, but only one would typically be called pájaro. Which one?

Ave (AH-veh, as in Ave María; that ave is a different word, a Latin greeting usually translated as “hail”) is a scientific term: the taxonomic class Aves. It’s broad, covering hummingbird and sparrow, turkey and heron. It can name categories, e.g. birds of prey (aves de rapiña), poultry (aves de granja, literally “farm birds”), or songbirds (aves cantoras). And it is often literary or poetic in tone.

Pájaro, true to its origins, is almost always used to mean used a relatively small, flying bird, typically a songbird. Somewhat informal, it can also be applied humorously to birds that would usually not be so called: a penguin, for instance, or a goose, or a ñañdú (the three-toed South American counterpart of the ostrich).

In English, “bird” carries singly almost all the weight that in Spanish is shared by ave and pájaro. In English, the Latin root avis appears only in scientific or technical terms such as “avian”, “aviform”, or “aviation”.

In highly informal or vulgar language, pájaro can refer to the male genital organ, a connotation not absent from English: think of “flipping the bird” for the obscene, middle-finger gesture. In some (particularly Caribbean) countries, pájaro, pato (duck) and the like can mean male homosexual.

Bird-related expressions where English and Spanish coincide include “A little birdie told me” (Me lo contó un pajarito) and calling someone “a strange bird” (rara avis).

On the other hand, Pájaro que comió, voló (literally: Bird that ate, flew away) is rendered in English simply as “Sorry to eat and run”. And saying something is “for the birds”, or worthless, in English, has no avian counterpart in Spanish, although in Argentina the rhymed expression “Alpiste, perdiste” (literally: Birdseed, you lose) is common in a situation where someone has said something they regret, or otherwise made a mistake.

While we’re on the subject of birds, we can’t help but think of the humorous definition of Homo sapiens, often attributed to Plato, as “the featherless biped”.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright © 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the June 23-29, 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the regular bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (inglés>español) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter (inglés<>español) who also provides custom-designed cultural/linguistic coaching and training.

2013-06-02 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Summer, its names and romance

Dear reader,

The calendar tells us that the Northern Hemisphere summer is still a few weeks away. A few moments outdoors confirm that the season is already here. Let’s spend a minute with its names in English and Spanish.

“Summer romance” (amores de verano, in Spanish), a phrase that brings a sigh to many lips.

“Summer” is Germanic in origin (Old Saxon sumar)… One of the oldest extant texts in English is the poetic hymn to the season, ”Sumer is icumen in” (Summer is here), from 13th century Middle English.

Spanish verano, unsurprisingly, comes from Latinveranum; what’s unexpected to modern eyes and ears, though, is that veranum could mean either spring or summer. These seasons, which we differentiate, were historically blurred together—as were their names. Indeed, Spanish primavera, for spring, used to mean “early summer”.

English speakers turn “summer” into a verb and speak of “summering in Maine”; in Spanish, the noun has to be retrofitted to make veranear: Antes veraneábamos en la sierra (We used to summer in the mountains).

(By the way, let’s clear up a lingering doubt: the seasons are not capitalized in English unless part of a proper name such as “Summer Olympics”, “Fall Semester”.)

Kids go to “summer camp”, which in Spanish can be called either la colonia de verano or, much like the English, el campamento de verano.

Spanish has another word for summer, almost unused except in literary contexts: el estío (from Latin aestivum), a relative of French été. The same root is present in “to estivate” or “estivation” (the latter a hot-weather equivalent of hibernation).

Finally, dear reader, there must be a “summer romance” that you can recall with a sigh. Curiously, this phrase, the same as its Spanish equivalent, amores de verano, was little used before the 1960s.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright © 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the June 9-15, 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the regular bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (inglés>español) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter (inglés<>español) who also provides custom-designed cultural/linguistic coaching and training.

2013-05-29 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

CIA and “SEE-ya”: Adventures in translating abbreviations

Dear reader,

The name of the agency is abbreviated, in English, as an initialism (each letter pronounced separately, “C-I-A”). In Spanish, the initialism is transformed into a true acronym, pronounced as if it were a word: “SEE-ya”.

In an earlier column, we observed how abbreviations made up of initial letters (sometimes, initial syllables), can be divided into two subtypes: (i) acronyms like PIN or RAM, which are pronounced like words, and (ii) initialisms like ATM or NGO, pronounced letter-by-letter. These abbreviations present many curiosities and challenges to the translator. Here are just a few examples…

Where English uses the initialism “UN” for the United Nations, Spanish has“ONU” (pronounced “OH-new”), for Organización de las Naciones Unidas.
The birth of “laser” as an acronym for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” was long forgotten in English by the time Spanish officially adopted láser. Likewise for “radar”, “scuba”, and “MIDI”.
“CIA”, a famous initialism, is different. The agency’s name has an official Spanish translation: Agencia Central de Inteligencia, but the Spanish abbreviation, oddly, is not “ACI”. Rather, Spanish long ago imported the initialism directly and made it an acronym: CIA (pronounced “SEE-yah”). An additional oddity is that the acronym is occasionally spelled Cía, which, with a period following, happens to be the Spanish abbreviation forCompañía (Company)—and “The Company” is a fairly well-known nickname for that agency.
Yet another situation is that of “compact disc”. This term has an accepted Spanish translation, disco compacto. As with “CIA”, though, the abbreviation is not “DC” (as you might expect) but “CD”, straight from English. Until about a decade ago, this was usually pronounced “seh-DEH” in the Hispanic world; but, more and more, Spanish speakers use English phonetics to say it: “see-DEE”.

Much agility is needed to translate and interpret these terms. The circumstances of their birth are diverse—and so are the paths they take from one language to another.

¡Buenas palabras!
Pablo

Copyright © 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the 12-18 May 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the regular bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation”. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (inglés>español) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter (inglés<>español) who also provides custom-designed cultural/linguistic coaching and training.

2013-05-02 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

How we “save a file” in Spanish

Dear reader,

It’s something yours truly will do in a few minutes, you will likely do more than once today… and forgetting to do it can sometimes bring real headaches.

We’re talking about one of the most common, ordinary acts of contemporary life: preserving what you’ve written or changed in a computer document: “saving a file”. This term has no single, accepted Spanish translation; rather, there are various options.

When you stop to think about it, “file” is a strange noun to use for a single document; its ordinary, non-computing meanings are a device, drawer, or piece of furniture where documents are kept; or a folder holding papers on a matter or topic. The computing sense of “file” is usually rendered as Spanish documento or archivo, with the latter increasingly dominant.

Archivo, whose standard meanings include a cabinet or archive (a room or building where many documents are held), is also a curious thing to call a letter or other simple document.

And “to save”? Here, also, there are two main possibilities: salvar or guardar. The first directly translates “save”, but with a discordant connotation of rescue that the English word can shed. The second conveys well the notion of preserving, but with the added sense of putting away—which doesn’t quite fit, as we “save a file” frequently while working on it.

Both languages struggle with the novelty of computing: what we do when we “save a file” has no exact analogy in the world of pen and paper, or even typewriter.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright © 2013 by Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was originally written for the 5-11 May 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as part of the weekly bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation. Pablo Julián Davis (www.interfluency.com) is an ATA Certified Translator (Eng>Spa) and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Court Interpreter (Eng<>Spa).

2013-04-15 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

After the meal, the lovely (and untranslatable?) ‘sobremesa’

Dear reader,

Imagine a tasty and pleasant meal shared with friends, or at a family reunion. Dessert is finished. Now comes coffee, or perhaps cordials… maybe some other confection… and more coffee… And all the while, the conversation rolls on, the stories, the jokes.

Spanish has a term for it: la sobremesa, when the talk and the laughter are just more food and drink.

After the meal, that long session of coffee, or tea, or wine, or dessert, or a combination of these… but conversation as the main dish. It’s the ‘sobremesa’ so important in Spanish/Latin American culture… and virtually untranslatable into English.

How to translate this lovely, expressive word into English?

That’s quite a puzzle, because sobremesa simply has no exact equivalent in English—not even a fairly close one.

The attempts at translation we’ve seen (“table talk,” “after-dinner conversation,” and “sitting on after a meal,” among others) describe it, barely. And, really, la sobremesa is more than any of those things!

But, phrases like these may be the best we have. Sometimes that’s how we translate, by describing, even if the result is inexact and clumsy.

At other times, the foreign word is used directly. It typically happens when the translator has the need, or luxury, of emphasizing how different the other culture is: this is the case of many novels and anthropological accounts.

It’s an intriguing question, why one language lacks a word for something another names. Clearly, English speakers have “sobremesas,” though likely less frequent and less lengthy. Our sense is that it doesn’t quite have enough importance, in this culture, to have “rated” being given a name.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

2013-04-12 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

How do you translate a sneeze… or a kiss?

Dear reader,

Onomatopeia, a powerful expressive resource, represents in written or spoken language a sound, action, or phenomenon. Some months back, we looked at some animal sounds, like the rooster’s “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” that Spanish expresses as ¡Kikirikí or ¡Cocoricó!

¿”¡Chuik!” ó “¡Muá!”… ?¿O tal vez, de acuerdo al inglés, “Smooch!”?

This week, let’s consider some human sounds, starting with the little explosion that is a sneeze. Spanish represents it as ¡Achís! (ah-CHEESS) or¡Achús! (ah-CHOOSS); the second, less common, is similar to English “Ah-choo!”

Since sneezing is physiological, much more than cultural or linguistic, it’s evident that each language “hears” or “interprets” the sound uniquely.

Sometimes the languages differ widely. Spanish represents a kiss as ¡Chuik! (chweek) or ¡Muá! (mwah); English, as “Smooch!” For physical revulsion, Spanish uses ¡Puaj! (pwach, with guttural Germanic/Scots ‘ch’) or ¡Uf; typical in English is “Yuk!” or its infantile adjective form, as in “That’s yucky!” The latter’s one of the first words children in Spanish-speaking homes learn from English-speaking schoolmates.

Throat-clearing, on the other hand—a physiological act, that can also be used expressively to get someone’s attention or request silence—is similar: ¡Ejem! is almost identical to English “Ahem!”

Exclamations of pain are a curious case: the Spanish speaker stubbing her toe on a rock cries “Ayyy!” (like the letter ‘I’), nothing like English “Ouch!” or “Oww!” It turns out that an act one would think purely physiological is actually cultural, and that pain is “pronounced” differently from language to language.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright © 2013 por Pablo Julián Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the 21-26 April 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).

2013-04-10 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).

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How to work with an interpreter

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)

Translating “bird” into Spanish

Summer, its names and romance

CIA and “SEE-ya”: Adventures in translating abbreviations

How we “save a file” in Spanish

After the meal, the lovely (and untranslatable?) ‘sobremesa’

How do you translate a sneeze… or a kiss?

“Yours truly” and other linguistic gestures of modesty

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

12.20.17 Drinking a unique toast

12.10.17 The violent alienation of “ajeno”

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