Lenox, who has been discussing the role (roll-on, roll-off?) of Google Translate in quality public service provision, has passed along this little gem from the wider reaches of linguistic dilettantism – Colombia, where 1,221 medals were cast for the World Games without wasting precious time on letter-checking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itMv6sW-STk Lost Letters Departments have of course swept…
Michael Gilleland < Christoph Irmscher < Longfellow: The difficulty of translation lies chiefly in the color of words. Is the Italian “Ruscelletto gorgoglioso” fully rendered by “Gurgling brooklet”? Or the Spanish “Pájaros vocingleros” by “Garrulous birds”? Something seems wanting. Perhaps it is only the fascination of foreign and unfamiliar sounds; and to the Italian or…
Los cuentos de Eva funcionan muy bien, tanto en español como en inglés. Su vestido fue buena idea, él mío no tanto: mi disfraz estándar será traje/frac con peluqaza Javier Bardem en No es país para viejos. Ahora tengo que vender el concepto a escuelas – he tenido contacto con cuatro, y me gustaría hacer…
Carles Miró has serendipited one N Tassin’s enlistment of Josep Pla and Eugeni Xammar, as short of money as they were of Russian, in his mission to bring to the benighted South Americans the curious blessings and recommendations produced in such prodigious quantities by his compatriot. Here’s a high-speed bit of unplanned Pla: Tassin placed…
The latest pseudo-anglicism to cheer my bedraggled brain comes from a 20-year-old Albacete knife manufacturer. (See also camping, parking, lifting, shampooing, footing, and Wikipedia.) I like the dropped /g/, which interestingly goes against a trend in Andaluz and increasingly in other versions of Spanish to add a terminal /g/ to words previously ending in /n/.…
