Adelante:
‘Ice e-skating,’ said Marta.
‘Ice skating,’ said Domingo.
‘Ice e-skating.’
‘No, no. No e. Ice skating. Try it again.’
Marta hesitated.
‘Go on!’
‘Ice es-kating,’ she said, with deliberation.
Domingo smiled. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s a common problem for Spaniards. Two consonants together causes a difficulty. I have conquered this issue after a long time. But you are unlikely to need these words in any case.’
‘I would like to learn some English,’ said Marta.
Domingo puffed his cheeks and spat the air out in a fuff. ‘It will come. Don’t worry about it. Where’s the need anyway?’[…]
[Domingo:] ‘Although Valencia University is one of the best in the world, these people here are by and large ignorant and know nothing of the Brontës or Thackeray.’
Marta began to put things away. She needed to get in the cupboard that Domingo blocked with his body. He didn’t move although she waited in front of him. Eventually she left the pans on the cooker to be put away in the morning.
Yup, you got it: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, with the names changed (Cada martes tiene su domingo), works pretty well as a 1920s Spanish novel about the rural-urban divide & co.
You can observe Spaniards and Bangladeshis side-by-side at Billingsgate fish market saying “Where’s that e-skate from?” You may be pleased to hear that in this at last – at long last – I have found a way to make my fortune. I am setting up a genuine night school (hours: 04:00-06:00) alongside the existing music school at Billingsgate purely to correct this aspect of South European and South Asian English phonetics. Its name? “E-learning”.
Similar posts
- “Heidi stole my voice!”
The recollections of Selica Torcal, 86, who 40 years ago started dubbing the protagonist of the Japanese series into Spanish. She - More evidence that Barcelona Council doesn’t give a fuck about German
In order to get walkers down from the carpark exit from Park Güell a tourist superhighway is being constructed along what - Reagrupament and mesophrase, the subcategory of translation that Dryden forgot
Candide of CataloniaWatch appears to have come to the conclusion that watching Catalonia is rather like watching paint dry, but without - La Moncloa prints press conference Arabic backwards
It may slowly be dawning on even Zapatero, with his great Alliance of Civilisations, that the road to الجحيم is paved - The economic case for fucked translation
Via LS an anonymous cartoon of the gulf between what we (would like to) think we have said and what we
Comments