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.
Colin thinks that the Excelentísimo Concello de Betanzos, a small town in La Coruña province, may want to reconsider their self-awarded superlative. Not all friends are false.
Conjecture: In writing about insidious Albion, El País and their Spanish colleagues faithfully copy-paste Wikiclichés except when they come to proper nouns including an “h”, when dyslexic Anglophobia is allowed free rein: Celtic difícilmente volverá a ganar la Copa de Europa. Ya se sabe también que últimamente no es una heroicidad conquistar el Celtic Park.…
The first phoneme of the subject of this splendid story by the Diario de Jerez appears to have colonised the first of the (long defunct) Whiteways Cider Co. Ltd., and they probably deserved it. For Whiteways et al in 1966 sought a ruling allowing them to market as sherry beverages that used the Jerez process…
Don Colin, who has more members than Lingual S&M, wonders whether this is de la abeja rodillas. Just out of interest, here’s the original 1st para: Se encuentra a pie mar, sobre una pequeña península y, durante el siglo I a.C., las gentes que lo habitaron vivían en unas 20 viviendas en forma circular dentro…
Vino en botella = he/she came in bottle, via Carlos from En la luna de Babel, who may also have been the source of the previous post. Meanwhile Mark Liberman is moving in on the French trade in hallucinogens.
Tom (who is these days blogging less and twittering more) encountered this proclamation on entering Ciudadela de Menorca, and suggests correctly that it refers to the publication in the Boletín Oficial del Estado of a fascist decree, promoted by education minister Manuel Lora Tamayo and signed off by Franco on Christmas Eve 1964, protecting the…