Circus or fish market?

Peter Harvey links to this contribution by Tom Maguire, which finds a translator of a circus poster in Sitges struggling with the polysemous llotja and imagining a splendid fish market where a simple box was all that was required.

Makes you wonder, though: maybe Juvenal has been misquoted on the moral decline of pagan Roman, and they longed not for panem et circenses but for panem et piscem, bread and fish; maybe the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes was borrowed by Jesus from a corrupt emperor; maybe it’s time for some coffee.

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Published
Last updated 07/08/2011

This post pre-dates my organ-grinding days, and may be imported from elsewhere.

Anonymous circus (1):

Barcelona (1399):

English language (462):

Föcked Translation (414): I posted to a light-hearted blog called Fucked Translation over on Blogger from 2007 to 2016, when I was often in Barcelona. Its original subtitle was "What happens when Spanish institutions and businesses give translation contracts to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London and only charges 0.05€/word." I never actually did much Spanish-English translation (most of my work is from Dutch, French and German) but I was intrigued and amused by the hubristic Spanish belief, then common, that nepotism and quality went hand in hand, and by the nemeses that inevitably followed.

Spain (1881):

Spanish language (504):

Translation (788):


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