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.
Why’s the Spanish translation not called “Celsius 233”? Because its perceived market consists not of book-devouring hermits who care about the relationship between title and text, but of exhibitionists in search of accessories symbolising of culture and modernity? Why worry about book-burning when no one reads the damn things anyway?
Lenox’s take on the tourism department in Mojácar, where, including unregistered residents, there are probably at least as many British- as Spanish-born, but where it doesn’t occur to the (ruling) Spanish-speakers to ask the (generally leisured) English-speakers for paid or unpaid help with tourist promotion. Some of the German press this morning are probably reaffirming…
Check out fellow-moaner, Malaprensa. Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, will need it, and if John Baker is permissible, then why not the other way round more generally – Ayudaporelamordedios Rajoy, for example?
In comments, from the excellent Pueblo Girl, a not uncommon Spanglish eggcorn, and one previously much enjoyed in English too. For example: Stake versus Steak.On one occasion, Garrick dined in the beef-steak room at Covent Garden, ready dressed in character for the part of Ranger, which he was to perform the same night at the…
Lenox points me to an article called “Hotels In Benalmadena, Mojacar And Vera – Spend The Amazing Night Life!“, which returns ca. 1800 ghits for me this morning. That level of distribution kind of surprises me, because fucked Spanish translation tends to be the work of artisans apparently innocent of the benefits the age of…
Via LS an anonymous cartoon of the gulf between what we (would like to) think we have said and what we (are understood to) have actually said: Why don’t we say what we think? Why do the inventors of magnificent flying machines gibber like madmen? Why, in our case, do excellent Spanish bars produce hilarious…
Once again we stray from the straight and narrow of our mission onto the great scrubby heath of linguistic hilarity. The double airco and window/door configuration here clearly forms an elephant’s eyes and trunk, suggesting a menagerie shared with the one-eyed trouser-snake, but this is an MOR clothing retailer in Manresa, not a boutique dedicated…
Wine-buff Víctor de la Serna (via Carlos Ferrero) has nailed Domecq Bodegas for an amusing slip on the otherwise impeccable site, “When did you born?” I haven’t really looked for literary or scientific evidence, and I’m pretty ignorant of non-me dialectal forms, but I’d hazard that this form is actually quite common among some groups…