The recollections of Selica Torcal, 86, who 40 years ago started dubbing the protagonist of the Japanese series into Spanish. She didn’t like dubbing Japanese or Isao Takahata‘s animation style – “poorly done, with her mouth open all the time, it was extremely difficult” – and preferred being Lois Lane and Shirley Temple: The only…
An old junk-shop or an old-junk shop; an old shop that sells curiosities, or a shop that sells old curiosities? One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and I wondered idly whether the Spanish translators hadn’t all got it wrong -perhaps misled by the building’s current, posh aspect- and whether it shouldn’t have been La vieja…
We’re all fucked in the end -the reward for life is death- but meanwhile the profession would be greatly improved if rendered client-free. MM: My career as a translator of guides to buildings in Central Europe started ignominiously when I gave in to the resident of Schloß Leitheim, who insisted it was Leitheim Castle. Others…
“All day I’ve faced, the barren waste,without a taste of… Can you see that big green tree,Where the sandwish’s running free,And it’s waiting there for you and me?” I do Cool Water with the organ, and it’s a great favourite, but the other day I made the mistake of introducing the mirage song as a…
Boby Lapointe, an obsessive, deranged comic genius who seems to have drunk himself to death aged 50, points to one of the delicious traps lying in wait for elephants who proceed beyond their French-English phrasebooks – the fact that of the supposed infinity of possible sentences in natural language, most are nonsense: What time is…
… when writ large is misleading and restrictive, so away with it: “Un túnel medieval construido durante el renacimiento, abandonado por siglos, y recientemente restaurado, vincula el lado italiano con el lado francés de los Alpes.“
