Lavengro

To be or not to be in Spanish

Ilan Stavans has an interesting piece on Lingua Franca about ser and estar in Spanish. They both correspond to English be. Why Spanish needs two verbs to say what other languages say with one, or even without any copular verb, is a mystery. But language is full of mysteries. The basic rule is that ser is used for permanent states and estar for temporary or changeable ones: es feliz means that someone is a happy person by nature while está feliz means that they are in a happy mood at the moment. Stavans goes on to describe various translations of Shakespeare’s ‘To be or not to be’.

A confusing Spanish translation problem is the pun:

No están todos los que son pero sí son todos los que están.

This plays on son and están, both of which mean they are. The good people on WordReference try their best and come up with:

Not all of them are here, but the ones that are here, are here.
Not all of the listed are here, but the ones that are here, are listed.
Not all of the needed are here, but the ones that are here, are needed.
Not all of the required are here, but the ones that are here, are required.

The are here is for están and the precise definition is for son.

Another mystery, even greater perhaps, is that while estar is usually explained, as I have said, for states that are not permanent, and is logically used for people who are alive:

Mi padre está vivo (My father is alive.)

It is also used for people who are dead:

Mi madre está muerta (My mother is dead.).

There is an attempt at an explanation here on about.com, but it is admitted that it is very strange.

That's a good question, and the answer is probably to be found somewhere in the history of the Spanish language rather than in any logical application of the rules of grammar. To the native Spanish speaker, ser and estar are two separate verbs, seldom interchangeable. But because they can both be translated as "to be," they have been the source of confusion over the years to English speakers learning Spanish as a second language.

Why you need professionals

The English website of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona has obviously been translated by a competent professional (not me) but it seems that when they only needed to update one figure they just decided to do it by themselves without troubling their translator.

Solving a problem

The other day I was translating the website of a company that makes products of interest to mothers of babies and young children. A part of it was already in English for me to check and I found this:

Are you willing to teach your baby in your videos and photos?

Clearly something had gone wrong but I was at a loss as to what it could be. I was thinking of simply referring it back to the client when the solution occurred to me. I will leave a spoiler space so that readers who know Spanish can think about it.

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When I mentally translated it back into Spanish instead of thinking purely in English terms, I realised that it was caused by the ambiguity of enseñar, which is the standard equivalent of teach but can also sometimes mean show (the root enseña is related to English ensign). The question should be:

Are you willing to show your baby in your videos and photos?

It relates to privacy and is asking for permission to use uploaded pictures of babies online.

Russian fast food

Thanks to this sign I have learnt the Russian for fast food. It is фастфуд (fastfud).

Though written in English, this sign is in Barcelona so it advertises Mediterranean fast food. The Russian reads:

Лучший средиземноморский фастфуд

The first word лучший (luchshiy) means the best (Slavonic languages do not trouble themselves with articles and do not seem to suffer as a result).

The second word средиземноморский (sredizemnomorskiy) is a compound adjective: среди means middle, земно means earth, мор means sea and ский is a masculine singular nominative adjectival ending. The sea in the middle of the earth is of course a calque of the Latin Mare Mediterraneum, which has given its name to the sea in Romance languages and also English. German has the calque Mittelmeer, and Germany is close enough to the sea and has a sufficient history of connection with the Roman empire to understand the connection but I find it curious that Russian should use a name that is translated from Latin and makes no sense in terms of Russian geography.

Photo copyright © Peter Harvey 2013.

The art of good translation

In Barcelona there is a shop that specialises in hand-cut ham. It was willing to spend good money on a publicity sign but not on the translation.

Photo copyright © Peter Harvey 2013.

Elude the panic

Just what you need if the Hotel Les Torres near Martorell Spain ever catches fire – a good laugh!

Metaphors again – clouds, horses, foreheads and more

I have mentioned the risks of translating metaphors literally from one language to another. Sometimes the idea is the same: for example the Spanish A caballo regalado, no le mires el dentado means the same as Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

A Spaniard who tells you that you can’t swim and guard your clothes (nadar y guardar la ropa) is saying that you can’t fulfil two incompatible objectives; in English we use a different metaphor for satisfying physical desire by saying that you can’t have your cake and eat it. And if in Spanish two birds are killed with the same shot (matar dos pájaros de un tiro), in English it is done with the same stone. Spanish metaphor has entered the modern world.

But the idea cannot always be the same in different cultures. That every cloud has a sliver lining is a common observation for anyone who is familiar with British weather; but, while grey clouds with silver-coloured fringes are not unknown* in Spain, they are far from being so common as to be the stuff of metaphor. The same idea is expressed quite differently by saying no hay mal que por bien no venga, which means that there’s no evil that doesn’t come for some good reason.

Sometimes the metaphor is obscure: No tiene dos dedos de frente (he hasn’t got two fingers of forehead) means that he’s as thick as a plank. The idea can, however, be turned round: Necesitas más de dos dedos de frente para ser doctor means that you need more than two fingers of forehead to be a doctor.

Another way to say in Spanish that someone is thick is to say that they are corto, which means short in English, implying a shortage of brainpower. Danger lurks; my mother-in-law was a short woman measuring just one and a half meters in height, but when my wife told a Spanish friend that her mother was corta, she gave quite the wrong impression. In Spanish she would be said to be baja. But there again, no-one – I hope – would say in English that their mother was low!

*In Politics and the English Language Orwell says that ‘banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation.’ While he may be right in some cases (and I hope to discuss that essay some time), here I am deliberately negating the possible, reasonable assumption that such a meteorological phenomenon would be unknown in the Mediterranean area.

(Images, Peter Harvey, Dos dedos de frente)

Foreigner or immigrant?

I was watching an episode of the BBC detective series Wallander the other day. It set in Sweden and is based on Henning Mankell’s series of books. In the first episode of the second series, Faceless Killers – and I am giving nothing away by writing this – Wallander thinks that a woman’s dying words might have been farmer or foreigner or something similar. This fact is leaked to the press who mount a racist campaign against a supposed foreign killer.

Somehow, this public outcry that the killer might be a foreigner seemed a little strange to me. Then I realised that surely in English, or at least in the UK, the word used by the media would be immigrant rather than foreigner. I assume, and I don’t know and I have no Swedish, that the original book reflects the use of the Swedish word for foreigner in this context, but I am surprised that this translation made its way into the excellent BBC production.

(Image, Wikipedia)

Horses for courses

In a recent post I wrote, with special reference to split infinitives, that like the Economist I played safe with controversial aspects of grammar:

My job is to teach and advise people who need to use English for their business and professional purposes. I also translate texts, sometimes for publication, for people who are demanding in their requirements. I simply cannot afford to have a student come back to me with a complaint that something that I have taught or tolerated has been criticised in no uncertain manner as a grammatical solecism by a native speaker; nor can I afford to have an argument with a translation client on the same matter. As a result, I play it safe just as the Economist does.

I thought that that point of view would be fairly uncontroversial but it was not. Indeed, I was called to order by Geoff Pullum for it. So why have I just written these words in a translation:

We can’t do that ’cos there’s only four of us.

The answer is, of course, to be found in the context. Here I am transcribing a video of children playing. The register is entirely different from that of professional correspondence or formal business negotiation. In other words, I write what my client expects and needs while keeping, obviously, within the accepted norms of English usage.

A translator improves the original

Cultural references and humour are great problems for any translator. What is regarded as basic general knowledge in one culture may be unknown or even seem bizarre in a different one, while humour is often literally untranslatable if it involves a play on words. For example, I once translated advertising material that used a cat as the icon of the campaign for something that was free. The slogan was gatuito, playing on Spanish gato (cat) and gratuito (free). All I could do was leave the word as it was, thus losing an element of humour.

So it was with great pleasure that I found an example of a translator actually improving on an original. In the TV series The Office a character is describing a tasteless club in Slough that has a Tudor theme and says ‘They’ve got an Anne Boleyn bowling gallery.’ (The particular tastelessness lies in the naming of a bowling gallery for a woman who was beheaded.) This was subtitled in Spanish as ‘Tienen una Ana Bolera.’ The point is that Anne Boleyn is known, and not liked, in Spain as the woman who caused Henry VIII to divorce Catherine of Aragon, who was the King of Spain’s daughter. Names of royalty are always translated in Spanish (even now the British royal family has Isabel and Felipe with their son Carlos, and grandchildren Guillermo (married to Catalina) and Enrique) and Anne Boleyn is known as Ana Bolena. It happens that the Spanish for a bowling gallery is bolera so by combining the two, Ana Bolera provides a humorous play on words that is, to my mind, better than the mere sarcasm of the original.

Bolena	Bolera

(Images, Wikipedia)