The other day I did a translation for a Spanish hotel chain. It was publicity material and had the slogan: ‘Queremos que vengas. Queremos que vuelvas.’ I translated this as: ‘We want you to come. We want you to come back’ thinking that the repetition of ‘come’ modified by ‘back’ the second time, caught the style of the original. The client had a query: Doesn’t ‘come’ have a sexual connotation, meaning to have an orgasm? Well, yes it does but I explained that it is not possible to avoid the word on all occasions and that while some people might see it that way, not everyone has a mind that works like that. After all, as Freud himself is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I also had to point out to the client that his proposed change to ‘We want you to come here. We want you to come back’ hardly improved the hotel's image from the point of view that he was suggesting, though at least he hadn’t proposed ‘We want you to come here. We want you to come again’!
El otro día realicé la traducción de un folleto publicitario de una cadena española de hoteles, con el eslogan ‘Queremos que vengas. Queremos que vuelvas’. Puse: ‘We want you to come. We want you to come back’ pensando que así cogí la repetición del original. Vuelve el cliente con su duda:
En el titular del folleto ‘We want you to come. We want you to come back.’ Se ha comentado internamente si la primer frase no puede dar a entender el significado sexual de come/correrse.
Pues, efectivamente es así para los que piensan de esta manera, pero no se puede evitar siempre la palabra ‘come’ porque en la lengua coloquial significa ‘correrse.’ Se dice que según el mismo Freud, a veces un cigarro es sólo un cigarro.
El cliente sigue con:
No es mejor poner?: ‘We want you to come here. We want you to come back.’
No es mejor, difícilmente se mejora la imagen de un hotel diciendo a los clientes: ‘Queremos que te corras aquí. Queremos que vuelvas’. Menos mal que no sugirieron: ‘We want you to come here. We want you to come again.’ (Queremos que te corras aquí. Queremos que te corras otra vez.)
"We want you to visit us. We want you to return"? No, not really very snappy.
Posted by: Baralbion | 22/01/2007 at 09:26
No indeed, and snappiness is what is required in advertising. The original has two sentences with a good rhythm that differ only slightly in the last word (vengas/vuelvas - you come/you return or come back, subjunctive) I chose 'come' for the first to go with 'come back' in the second, which repeated and extended the verbal form. Anything that doesn't have 'come' in the first part fails to achieve this. Or at least, 'visit' (and perhaps 'revisit') will lose the snappy rhythm while not quite saying the same thing.
Translation is often rather more complicated and subtle than people realise. Every time you are in another country, or visiting a non-English web site, and you see something in English, someone somewhere has translated it.
Posted by: Peter Harvey | 22/01/2007 at 14:51
A friend who teaches languages in Britain has pointed out that even 11-year-olds now snigger when 'kommen' or 'venir' is being taught.
Of course in my day we had fun when the teacher was dealing with the very basic words: damit (therewith, so that), Vater (father, pron. farter) and Fahrt (journey). And that was even before we met the Langenscheidt Dictionary.
Posted by: Peter Harvey | 22/01/2007 at 18:20
I'm a native Spanish speaker, and I have a similar problem. I find it hard to use "come" and "get off", even when I know they are perfectly valid words.
Posted by: Maria | 17/11/2009 at 15:00
Given the way many verbs in Spanish are made reflexive, I have to be careful when I talk about running!
Posted by: Peter Harvey | 17/11/2009 at 15:44