Interflows Language+Culture Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., CT, received his graduate training in Latin American History at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities and a Certificate from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; his undergraduate studies were at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture, delivering seamless, world-class translation and interpreting to the legal community and other professions, as well as innovative, interactive, and inspiring cultural-awareness training.

2012-05-04 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Cinco de Mayo not the ‘real’ Mexican national day?

The sense of shared identity that binds an immigrant group together in its adopted home is no mere transplanting of old-country customs. It involves creativity and innovation—and a dual process of celebrating ancestral ties while affirming group emergence into the fabric of life in the new country.

Calabrians, Sicilians, Tuscans, Abruzzians and other immigrants from the Italian Peninsula began to draw together in the late-19th-century U.S., just when a unified ‘Italy’ was being born. Columbus Day, Oct. 12 (also, later, ‘Día de la Raza’ or ‘Day of the Hispanic/Latino People’) grew by the 20th century into an Italian-American affirmation. For the Irish, whose history of mass immigration here is a half-century older, St. Patrick’s (St. Paddy’s) Day plays a similar role, as has Oktoberfest for German-Americans.

So, curious Americans’ periodic discovery that Cinco de Mayo –the Fifth of May—isn’t the ‘real’ Mexican national holiday (that would be Independence Day, Sep. 16), somewhat misses the point of the day: the affirmation of Mexicanness in a new land.

It commemorates not Mexico’s winning of independence from Spain (1821) but a more complex historical moment: Liberals’ 1862 military victory in the Battle of Puebla over French invaders and their Conservative allies. Starting in the mid-1840s, Mexico was wracked by a sequence of horrors unimaginable to most Americans—half of national territory lost in the U.S.-Mexican War; prolonged civil war triggered by the Liberals’ (most famously Benito Juárez’s) anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic reforms; a British-French-Spanish triple invasion, ostensibly to collect debts from a land bled dry by war; and finally a full-blown French occupation in alliance with the civil war’s defeated Conservatives.

The Mexican triumph at Puebla, against a superior French force double in size, forms an imperfect and contradictory part of the larger historical story. Ironies abound in its celebration. For one thing, after Puebla the French actually prevailed, ruling Mexico for three years. Also, a key figure at Puebla, young Gen. Porfirio Díaz, later became a dictatorial president whose endless, corrupt reelections eventually triggered the Mexican Revolution.

There are more ironies: the French had long dreamed of achieving footholds in former Spanish America. In the 1830s, geographer Michel Chevalier coined the term ‘Latin America’—a completely novel invention designed to make France’s ambitions in the Americas sound natural and logical. It caught on among many newly-independent Mexicans, Argentines, Chileans, etc., eagerly seeking identities separate from Spain. Moreover, the ruler Napoleon III sent to take the Mexican throne, Maximilian, was a naïve and ill-starred monarch who proved too liberal for the Conservatives, and awkwardly solicitous of Indian and mestizo peasants’ rights. Eventually executed, he and his wife (haunted by madness during her widowhood) became tragic, romantic figures with a contradictory place in Mexican memory.

So Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s national holiday, not the commemoration of independence from Spain, nor of definitive victory against the French. But Puebla preserves the memory of an unexpected victory after a generation of endless invasion, war, and loss. As such, it has become a forum for expression of the new and continually evolving ways of being, and proudly feeling, Mexican in the United States—as well as an opportunity, partly superficial and commercial to be sure, for Americans to interact with Mexican culture. Literally hundreds of local celebrations across the U.S. mark the day.

In an era when Mexico’s sons and daughters here face twin scourges of economic crisis and political vulnerability unlike any in living memory , it’s possible that Cinco de Mayo has never been quite as important as it is today.

Pablo Julián Davis

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. 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 cultural awareness training.

2012-02-11 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

“Giants own Patriots” or “Papá Gigantes”?!!

With their stunning Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots, the New York Giants not only became NFL champions for the second time in a five-year span, they also extended their recent, but impressive, domination of the team that has been pro football’s standard of excellence for the past decade.

The Giants, in the phrase of the hour, “own” the Patriots. (One example among thousands: “It’s Official: The Giants Still Own the Patriots“.)

Think about that for a minute! Sports domination expressed in terms of ownership—the dominated rival as the “property” of the dominator.

People in the Spanish-speaking world have a different way of talking about this sort of dominance: the language of paternity. The dominant team, metaphorically, is the rival’s father: you’re ’Papá’… and the other team? Well, ’Los tenemos de hijos’ (They’re our sons). Thus, Spanish soccer is witness to ”la paternidad ‘cule’“, Barcelona’s ascendancy over Real Madrid. In Mexico, fans of Pumas boast of their team as “papá” of rivals Cruz Azul and Chivas. Of course, in all cases, the assertion of paternal status is disputed by fans of the supposed “hijos” or sons.

In Argentine soccer, the hinchada (fans) of San Lorenzo swagger verbally before los bosteros (fans of Boca Juniors) as “Papá Santo” and proudly calculate “Un siglo de paternidad“, a century of fatherhood, over Boca Juniors. (Boca fans protest that San Lorenzo’s superiority in head-to-head competition extends back only as far as the professional era, which began in 1930, and that when amateur-era records are figured in, Boca actually comes out with a slight advantage.)

Boca fanatics, for their part, love to lord it over River Plate as “Papá Boca”, crowing particularly loudly now that River has suffered the humiliation of descenso—relegation to a lower league. (The illustration above right brings alive this whole sense of River as “hijo”; the Boca fan also uses his left hand to make a visual joke around the insulting nickname rivals use for River, gallinas, meaning ‘chickens’ or ‘hens’.) Indeed, there is a Facebook page entitled“Para Mi Hijo River, De Su Papá Boca” (For My Son River, From Your Daddy Boca).

While usually expressing sporting dominance as “ownership”, US culture is not completely alien to using the language of paternity. The phrase “Who’s your Daddy?” has made occasional appearances; the query became a catch-phrase of the Duke University men’s basketball team, and star player Shane Battier, around the year 2000.

The phrase really became notorious, though, during the 2003 baseball season. That year, the brilliant Dominican right-hander Pedro Martínez, one of the greatest pitchers of his generation, and at the time a member of the Boston Red Sox, was repeatedly frustrated by the New York Yankees. After a particularly galling defeat, he told reporters: “They beat me. They’re that good right now. They’re that hot. I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.”

Martínez was raked over the coals for this comment. The derision was relentless; Yankee Stadium, in particular, resounded with the chant, “Who’s your Daddy?” whenever he was pitching. Some of the glee in this mockery drew on the (at least vaguely sensed) sexual connotations of the phrase.

I am aware, though, of no one ever pointing out the sources in Hispanic/Latin American culture that were likely at play in Martínez’s unconscious mind, influencing him to express his frustration in that particular way. Martínez was also demonstrating a sense of underlying security, sportsmanship, and good humor with his remark. It’s conceivable, though, that calling the Yankees ‘Daddy’ was a mistake, actually compromising his ability to execute effectively against them. For this superlative performer and fierce competitor was, from then on, repeatedly stymied by the New Yorkers—most notably in the 2009 World Series, as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies. Or maybe the word was simply the perfect expression of the Yankees’ sustained command over him.

Still, the framework of domination-as-ownership prevails in US culture, and the framework of paternal authority in the Spanish-speaking world. It’s no accident. Commercial relations and property rights have a salience in the English-speaking world, and particularly the United States, that Hispanic/Latin American culture lacks. It’s not that these things are absent in the latter culture, but rather that they are nowhere near as central to the popular imagination. There, instead, the family still retains much of its ancient symbolic power as the fundamental ordering unit of society, and the underlying metaphor for virtually every social relationship.

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., C.T. is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture (TM), which delivers Spanish and English translation solutions as well as interactive, inspiring cultural training.

2012-01-12 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

The funny Spanish letter with the squiggle on top

January is, of course, the month when New Year’s greetings are exchanged: “Happy New Year” in English, Feliz Año Nuevo en español. The Spanish words for “year” and for the language itself both contain the single most readily-identifiable visible marker of the Spanish language: the letter ñ, pronounced ‘EN-yeh’. Ñ is a letter, but so much more: its cultural significance is great and seems only to be growing.

The ‘ny’ in English ‘canyon’ is the sound this letter represents. Indeed, that word comes from the Spanish cañón which can mean ‘canyon’ (like El Gran Cañón del Colorado, The Grand Canyon) or ‘cannon’ (the weapon). The job the single letter ñ does to represent the ‘ny’ sound in Spanish is done by two letters in other languages: in Italian and French by gn, and in Portuguese by nh, for instance. So lasagna is spelled lasanha in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon, but lasaña in Caracas and Buenos Aires.

So powerful is this letter (which many non-Spanish speakers think of as an ‘N with a little squiggle on top’) as a marker of Spanish-ness that one often hears English speakers add it to Spanish words that actually have only a simple ‘N’. For instance, the habanero pepper is often pronounced in English as if it were habañero. This sort of thing happens a lot in language and is known as ‘hyper-correction’: the speaker makes an extra effort to be correct, and overdoes it. It’s the same reason people sometimes say “They sent a letter to he and I.”

The familiarity of ñ to English speakers, especially in the United States, is reinforced by its presence in a number of words in common use: piñata, jalapeño, mañana, niño, España, español, and others.

Extract from Antonio de Nebrija’s pioneering grammar of the Spanish language, published in 1492, a year of some significance in Spanish, and world, history

But where did this peculiar letter come from? Historical linguists tell us that in the Middle Ages, Spanish words originating in Latin that had a double n came to be pronounced ‘ny’. The phonetic term for this is ‘palatalization’: rather than the tip of the tongue touching the front of the palate, at the edge of the teeth, the tongue is brought all the way up to the palate, or roof of the mouth, and a larger section of the tongue touches the palate. Thus, what had been an ‘n’ sound becomes ‘ny’. That is one part of the story—the sound.

And sound seems to be an important part of ñ‘s appeal. Some linguists of Spanish believe that the palatalization ofn is a strong phonetic tendency in infancy, which has led to a series of words beginning with ñ and having a childish (or sometimes, by extension, foolish) connotation. Some examples: ñoño (silly, insipid), ñoñería (foolishness),ñaña (nursemaid, big sister), ñato (snub-nosed, or simply a child), ñiquiñaque (person or thing of little value). Other linguists have pointed to the ñ sound as a marker of the Spanish language’s expansion to the Americas—and the impact of the native languages of the Americas on it. Words like ñañdú (an ostrich-like bird of South America) andñañdubay (a hardwood) come from the Guaraní. Others testify to African influence: ñame (yam) and ñánigo(member of the Abakuá male secret societies of African origin), while still others come from elsewhere: ñoqui is simply Hispanized phonetics for Italian gnocchi.

Besides sound, the other part of the story comes to us from paleographers, who study ancient writing: parchment, the paper of its day, was very expensive; to save space, writers or copyists of manuscripts placed one n—a smaller one—atop the other. So, in truth, the ‘single’ letter ñ was born as the fusion of two n‘s. (The ampersand, not unique to Spanish, was similarly born as a digraph, or combination of two letters: Latin et, meaning ‘and’.)

Throughout the modern history of the language, then, ñ has been a distinctive, instantly recognizable feature of Spanish writing and type: the fifteenth letter of the alphabet (for centuries it was the sixteenth, as the consonant combination ch, between c and d, was fourth; the reform of the year 2010 eliminated ch, as well as ll, as separate letters of the alphabet).

The age of the computer and the Internet brought with it a serious challenge to the survival of ñ, and revealed perhaps unsuspected depths of feeling towards it among Spanish speakers. In the early 1990s, unease arose in Spain over the exporting to that country of computer keyboards without the ñ (as well as the inverted marks that are used to open exclamations or questions). When the Spanish Government openly expressed its distress and raised the possibility of requiring computers sold in Spain to have an ñ key, the European Community cried “Foul!” and alleged protectionism.

At the same time, a wave of emotional defenses of ñ began to surge throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Famously, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez lashed out at the “arrogance” and “abuse” in the drive to eliminate ñ for reasons of mere “commercial convenience.” The Argentine poet María Elena Walsh, beloved composer of children’s music, also defended “this letter that is ours, this letter with its little hood, something that might seem insignificant, but is less ñoño [silly] than it might seem . . . The ñ is people.” Somehow ñ became a symbol—the symbol—of what was distinctive and unique about the Spanish language and the cultures that use it.

Finally, Spain passed a law in 1993 protecting ñ by requiring computer keyboards sold in the country to include it; invoking the Maastricht Treaty’s of cultural differences. Luis Durán Rojo, from Peru, tells this story engagingly. Of course, millions of Spanish speakers living outside of Spain and Latin America use laptops and other devices that lack an ñ key, and are not aware of how to produce that character (in Word, you press Control and Shift together, then the tilde key, then the letter n). The Spanish of emails, tweets, and instant messages is full of attempts to render the sound either phonetically (anio and the much less common anyo), Portuguese style (anho), or in Italian orthography (agno) for año. It is not uncommon to see ‘Feliz Ano Nuevo’—either an honest mistake by English speakers or a slightly off-color joke by hispanohablantes, as without the ñ‘s tilde it literally means ‘Happy New Anus’.

If the outcry over a ‘mere’ letter of the alphabet seems a bit silly, consider the reaction in the U.S. to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. That act of Congress, mandating (in an unspecified way and without a clear timetable) the “increasing” use of the metric system in the United States, created a U.S. Metric Board in charge of public education towards that end. More than one Jeremiad about the loss of our cultural identity was heard in the land; there was also ridicule (comedians joked about pushy people: “Give them 2.54 cm and they’ll take 1.6 km”). The USMB was disbanded by 1982, and a quarter-century later, use of the metric system in the U.S. is incomplete and irregular at best.

So the ñ survives, and in the process has become much more than a mere letter. In both the Spanish-speaking world and in the U.S. (which, in truth, is part of that world, having some 40 million inhabitants for whom Spanish is either the sole, dominant, or maternal language), this letter symbolizes a language, a culture, a population. Thus, the weekly cultural supplement of Buenos Aires’s Clarín, one of Latin America’s largest-circulation daily newspapers, called Ñ, is now in its tenth year. On its logo, cable network CNN en Español uses a large tilde (the ‘squiggle’) over both N’s. In 1999, Newsweek touted ‘Generation Ñ’, a phrase coined by Cuban-American publisher Bill Teck to name the magazine he founded, aimed at young North Americans of Latin American descent.

A series of little accidents, circumstances, and oddities of language and history led here: the double ‘N’ consonant in certain Latin words inherited by Spanish, palatalization leading to the ‘ny’ sound, the placing of one of the N’s atop the other… let bake for several centuries, turn up the heat of globalization and the imposition of standards, leading to the assertion of the rising cultural, demographic, and economic power of Spain, Latin America, and U.S. Hispanics/Latinos—and a once quaint and humble letter stands tall and looms large now, a sort of ambassador for an entire language and culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-12-13 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

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

Imagine you’re translating a document, from English into Spanish. Say it’s a letter, dated Tuesday, December 13, 2011 (that’s today). How do you translate that into Spanish? Well, that’s not too difficult: you’d render it as ‘martes, 13 diciembre 2011′, or perhaps ‘martes, 13 de diciembre de 2011′.

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

(Wall calendar for January 1931, a month with a ‘martes 13′ – Tuesday the 13th. By the famed artist and cartoonist Florencio Molina Campos, whose humorous but loving depictions of old-time scenes and characters of the Pampa have adorned wall calendars in Argentina for the better part of a century.)

The bad luck commonly held to attach to ‘martes 13′ actually comes in a double dose. To the triskadekafobia (a terrific Greek word, composed of thirteen+fear, that has the lovely property of sounding exactly like the thing it designates) that Hispanic/Latin American culture shares with Anglo-Saxon and many others across the world, is added a negative apprehension surrounding Tuesday. Tuesday aversion is not common in the English-speaking world (though in the cycle of the work week, it’s certainly not many people’s favorite day). Think of the nursery rhyme foretelling a child’s fortune from the day of its birth (“Tuesday’s child is full of grace…”), or old Solomon Grundy who was ”christened on Tuesday”.

In Spanish, though, the name for the second day following the Christian Sabbath is martes, Mars’s Day. Around this deity, most commonly known as the Roman god of war (equivalent to the Greeks’ Ares), spin a series of negative qualities: aggression, duplicity, hostility, selfishness. Reputedly despised by both his parents, Zeus and Hera, Mars could be worshipped for his valor and power (and apparently Venus did so), but perhaps more often feared. Herein lies at least part of the reason why Tuesday’s stock is so low in Hispanic-Latin American culture. “Día martes,” goes the well-known folk saying reflecting this, “no te cases ni te embarques” [On Tuesday, marry not nor set sail].

So, thinking of all these associations, let’s go back to our little translation problem. Only now, let’s imagine the year is not 2011 but rather 1980, and what we need to ‘move across’ (the original, physical meaning of ‘translate‘) from English to Spanish is not the date of a letter but the title of a movie. Specifically, director Sean Cunningham’s newly-released horror flick Friday the 13th (still with us almost a third of a century later, having reached twelve installments and a grand total of eleven different directors; is anyone truly in suspense over whether there will be a Part 13?).

With strict ‘dictionary accuracy’, we could release the film under the title Viernes 13. But to tap into the deeper resonances within Hispanic/Latin American culture, maybe we would better off shifting the day of the week to Tuesday and rendering the title as Martes 13. And that’s exactly what happened in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries of the Spanish-speaking world. However, the direct or ‘dictionary’ translation was used in still other countries, including Mexico and Spain.

One result of this convoluted set of circumstances: the association of Friday the 13th with bad luck, not native to Hispanic/Latin American culture, has to some extent been ‘imported’ from the English-speaking world—due to the power of what is often called popular, and might more accurately be termed commercial, culture.

And, let us not forget, it’s due also to the influence of an often overlooked group of ‘unacknowledged legislators’: members of the translators’ profession, whose decisions can have a significant impact on human affairs. What’s at stake is clearer when we think of the texts of laws and treaties, or the way that a statesman’s words are translated in a tense international negotiation. But even in this seemingly trivial example of a movie title, there are ‘real world’ implications. People’s likelihood of making certain personal or economic decisions—travel, a purchase, an apartment rental—is influenced by beliefs regarding numbers, dates, days of the week.

More adventures in the world of translation, this science, craft, and art all at the same time! And never more challenging than when cultural phenomena are what we’re translating.

2011-10-29 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Día de los Muertos, Halloween, and translation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bigger picture

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

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

Interfluency, navigating with precision and élan…

…between Spanish and English (in both directions), and across the cultures of the Americas and beyond. We deploy our linguistic and cultural skills to help you, your company or organization further your mission and convey your message just as effectively in Spanish as you would in English… and vice-versa. You’ve invested too much time, energy, faith, and resources into your profession or business to entrust the expression of that mission, and that message, to less-than-expert hands. We offer superior professional Spanish and English translation, interpreting, editing, writing, marketing, and related services; and a wide range of interactive, informative, and inspiring programs of cultural education and training.

Mobile menu contact icon

Mobile menu contact information (EN)

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

Cinco de Mayo not the ‘real’ Mexican national day?

“Giants own Patriots” or “Papá Gigantes”?!!

The funny Spanish letter with the squiggle on top

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

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

Día de los Muertos, Halloween, and translation

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

Interfluency, navigating with precision and élan…

About Us

Latest Posts

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”

Latest Tweets

Contact Us