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.
There’s a clever name for phonetic language parodies which I have forgotten because it’s hot and I have been undergoing ye notorious Spanish wine torture: Shades of Maria Luisa Puche, the undisputed champion. My favourite one actually makes more sense than the poésie concrète I wrote for a political campaign some years ago and is…
This lot can’t even decide if they’re going to transliterate their trademark as Lepai or Lepy (I hope there’s somewhere where they call it Leper): But it’s a brilliant little amp, none of your Apple shite.
Understanding Podemos, c/o Rikard. The old question: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. Quick nod in the opposite direction to the human and apparently also English girlfriend of boxer Serge Ambomo: He’s speaking English a lot…
IRQ posts a brilliant photo of Espe and abstentionist dog above a piece by “Hughes” which kicks off with Ana María Jiménez. The former presumably owns several palaces and speaks decent English. The latter has been living in a glorified cardboard box at Sofá de la Frontera for a couple of years to protest the…
A reader writes: I have found an excellent novel in Spanish by a long-dead author who is still just in copyright. He was already forgotten when he died, and has remained so. I’d like to translate and self-publish it. How much should I offer the rights-holders?
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…