What does the English translation of the official presentation website for Vinoble 2010 tell us? That the Mayoress of Jerez cares more about how her hair looks than about how her words are interpreted? That her administration is as thick as pigshit and happy to wallow in it? Well, not necessarily. Our etymology department has…
An amusing and presumably unintended glimpse of the Spanish economic pushmi-pullyu–are structural reforms for real or merely for foreigners?–is to be found on slide 22 of the “Kingdom of Spain Economic Policy and 2010 Funding Strategy” used by Secretary Campa yesterday in London (via): Can we implement this? We have done it in the past,…
Yep, but it‘s free, courtesy of Google Translate, and still substantially better than the work of many professional translators. It’s also fun (FT’s Alphaville blog is fast-moving cabaret) and not inappropriate to the crackpot tone adopted by José Blanco in the Spanish original. The last few days’ translation classic was also delivered by the Spanish…
Off-topic this week, I came across this remarkable headline: To beat the traffic problem in Trabzon scalpel was the first step. The subhead reinterprets the story to the disadvantage of the surgeon: Traffic problems in Trabzon take the first step was to shoot scalpel. Contacts there tell me that growing trade with Georgia and Russia…
In an FT piece a couple of days ago (via) we learn that “As Benoy discovered to its cost, interpreters need to be close to the subject matter as well as competent linguistically”. I didn’t catch the Zapatero Snakeoil Show chez les Obama the other day, but I did see most of Hillary’s slot on…
Kindly contributed by C, here’s a sign from the toilets of a restaurant in Jaén: Don’t though any papers into the water close. Use the trash bean. There is too much material here to deal with in one post, but we can report that modern forensic linguistics, combined with a couple of glasses of wine,…
El Espíritu del Sur is a specialist music promotor which doesn’t know the English names for common musical instruments and doesn’t think it’s worth paying someone to find out. And so we may enjoy gems like viola (es) -> he violates (en): BALANESCU QUARTET. The project that we propose is ” Quartet Programme” in that…
Oh dear. The translation of this memo by the Spanish National Competition Commission is actually pretty good, so I suspect there’s some revenge scenario at work here.
