by liberal japonicus
A good chance to work on my Spanish, here is Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez’ speech. The English translation is on the next page.
Pages: 1 2
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
Full disclosure: My brain went straight to Napoleon Dynamite.
I guess the White House will officially be ‘disappointed’ and His Orangeness will commit the usual crimes against the English language in inexpertly expressing this sentiment via his social media account.
I will be pleasantly surprised if the administration is merely “disappointed.”. What I expect is more like “outraged at the betrayal.”.
That’s why I made a distinction between the official reaction (to be delivered by Leavitt) and the (formally private) rants of His Orangeness. Leavitt will of course also sneer but the wording will be more conventional.
Not a bad speech for a socialist economist. Listening to the lisp was good for my Spanish too. He lost me here:
La pregunta, en cambio, es si estamos o no del lado de la legalidad internacional y, por tanto, de la paz . . .
Pero al mismo tiempo rechazamos este conflicto y pedimos una solución diplomática y política.
IMHO, si, son ingenuous. Time will tell.
That elision is reveals a bit more about the Spanish politics involved.
La ciudadanía española siempre repudió la dictadura de Sadam Hussein en Irak, pero no por ello apoyó la guerra de Irak, porque era ilegal, porque era injusta y porque no supuso una resolución real a casi ninguno de los problemas que pretendió resolver.
Del mismo modo, nosotros repudiamos al régimen de Irán que reprime, que mata vilmente a sus ciudadanos, particularmente a las mujeres.
There is a little back story to the Iraq part, Spain was part of the coalition of the willing in 2003 and the PM, Aznar, a conservative and a staunch ally of Bush, but there were train bombings in Madrid that the ruling party first blamed on ETA, but was later revealed to be a home-grown Islamist cell, something that seemed to be suppressed by the government because they knew it would f-up support for the deployment. (that summary doesn’t really do justice to all of the ins and outs)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings
Aznar was kicked out for Zapatero, the socialist candidate, who had campaigned against the deployment and withdrew Spanish troops when he got in office.
Just idle curiosity, but I wondered what did the translation:
What caught my eye was the obvious inconsistency of referring to a three-word phrase as four words. Dumping the statement into different tools produced either “no to war” or “no to the war”. In English there’s a subtle difference in the meaning of those. I don’t speak Spanish, so don’t know if there’s the same article vs no article thing (and the original has an article).
And completely off topic, the one thing I regret about my education choices over the years is spending four semesters on German in college. Four of Spanish would have been much more valuable for me, in practice. Unfortunately, at that time and place and my majors, the College would only let me count German or Russian.
I read that and just assumed that the phrase in Spanish had four words. That kind of difference between languages being not at unusual.
See, in German (because you studied that), “von dem” (“from the”) being rendered as “vom” — two English words becoming one in German. Differences between English and Japanese can be even larger, as I’m sure lj can attest.
I’m kind of surprised that my college Spanish, which I haven’t used in forty-five years, still allowed me to stagger through his speech. But, once you figure out some basic coding, Spanish is not that far a stretch from English. At least, not for the kind of language people use in speeches. Literature, I assume, would be beyond me now.
In French, it’s compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction – “non à la guerre”. cf. “vive la France”. I guess that Spanish is similar.
I would have changed “four words” to “three words” in the translation.
Spanish tends to use about a third more words than English to express the same thing. Japanese is also less information-dense than English. Vietnamese and spoken Chinese are more information-dense.
Pro Bono – In French, it’s compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction – “non à la guerre”. cf. “vive la France”. I guess that Spanish is similar.
I would have changed “four words” to “three words” in the translation.
Yes, Spanish is the same. “Tengo que trabajar los domingos” is literally “I have [that] to work the Sundays,” but idiomatically it’s ” I have to work on Sundays.”
I think it’s fun that the translation nods towards the actual Spanish construction, but can see how that might be confusing (or annoying) to someone who does not know Spanish. Changing the “four” to “three” preserves the sense. Adding “the” to make it four words creates ambiguity and introduces confusion because the definite article signals opposite things in the two languages.
These sorts of translation issues remind me of one of the challenges I ran into during the Spanish translation exam I took as part of my Ph.D. qualification. The Spanish word in one of the sentences was “patria” – the most literal translation of that would be “fatherland” or “land of my fathers,” but it could also be “home” or “homeland.” The writer could have chosen “pais” – “country,” or “nación” – “nation” in place of “patria,” but those would have lost the romantic, familial sense of “home,” and the sense of patriotism.
Because it was a book about the Spanish Civil War, and the person being written about was a member of the CNT/FAI and not a Nationalist, I decided to use “motherland” in place of “fatherland” in order to avoid the fascistic connotations of “fatherland” in American English (which might have led to the person being associated with Franco rather than the anarchists if the reader didn’t know much about the person, but knew just enough about the war to lead themselves astray), and dropped a footnote into the translation to explain that choice.
This is such a square bunch on this blog. The Spanish play it fast and loose when it comes to counting. Just relax and go with it.
“Pro patria mori” (in Latin) is usually translated “To die for one’s country”.
More seriously, I thought about the translation going from a 4-word Spanish phrase to a 3-word English phrase as uncontroversial because it best conveyed the intended meaning. But with the preceding reference to the number words in the phrase, going from “cuatro” to “three” wouldn’t convey the intended meaning. It’s just no longer the correct number of words after the translation.
I don’t know if there’s a convention for translating in that kind of situation, but somehow translating a word that has a more or less perfect analog for the intended meaning in another language to a different word seems fundamentally wrong to me. Words for numbers are about as exact in meaning as language can manage. There’s no selecting for sense or feeling or inference.
Four is just f**king four, right?
Not right.
When Sánchez said “La posición del Gobierno de España se resume en cuatro palabras: ‘No a la guerra'” he wasn’t seeking to tell us how many words there are in ‘No a la guerra’. He might have said “en pocas palabras” but decided, rightly, that giving the actual number of words is pithier.
If one translates it as “…in four words: ‘no to war'” the thought induced in the reader is first that the count is wrong, second (in a reader with some familiarity with romance languages) that there must have been a definite article in the Spanish. That is not the message Sánchez intended.
One should translate to give the message, not literally word by word.
I’m not sure what I would do with the translation, but I’d consider saying it as something like ‘one simple phrase’ or ‘one short phrase’
Counting words reminds me of the West Wing debate between Jed Bartlett and Florida gov Ritchie
https://youtu.be/sS4UAZ5UfGY?si=-aIzURqqN19_mgbP
“In two words, impossible.” — Samuel Goldwyn
“He might have said “en pocas palabras” but decided, rightly, that giving the actual number of words is pithier.”
So you must sacrifice the pithiness. Isn’t that part of the message?
I considered the use of something that simply avoided the specific number for the English translation. But my previous thought was limited to translating “cuatro” to “three.”
Would anyone here argue for that?
Would anyone here argue for that?
Yes, I would.
I would have changed “four words” to “three words” in the translation.
It comes down to What are you trying to do? If your intention is to translate the message, then go with “three words.” If your intention is to translate the words, “stick with “four words” like the translation we have here.
Or, as I learned it, are you doing a literal translation or a free translation? Back when I was in grad school, and looking to test out of German for the language requirement, I did a literal translation first**, and used that to do a free translation. Because what was wanted was to demonstrate understanding of the article being translated.
** It was a pretty trivial test. Time to look up (open dictionary!) every word that wasn’t a cognate for the literal translation. And still plenty of time to do the free translation. Good thing, though, that they didn’t require a translation going the other way!
I don’t speak or read Spanish so I only read the English translation.
My takeaway is that the Spanish PM is a thoughtful and articulate person who laid out a sane and humane response to the insanity we are unleashing on Iran and the world.
I can only say that I am envious of the Spanish for having a leader who can hold and articulate such a clear moral perspective.
Back when I was in grad school, and looking to test out of German for the language requirement, I did a literal translation first**, and used that to do a free translation. Because what was wanted was to demonstrate understanding of the article being translated.
In basic modern algebra, many of the structures are named using words for common items: group, ring, field, etc. In German, the same sort of convention is used but not all of the common terms are the same as the ones used in English. I had to do a final project translating a chapter from a German college math text. I put a cover note on it for the instructor pointing out that I knew der Körper translated to body in general use, but the structure it was used for was called a field in English.
English vs Spanish: Language Comparison
English vs German: Comparison
Okay. You (whoever that includes) win. Make the English “three.”
Spanish tends to use about a third more words than English to express the same thing.
My graduate school roommate was getting a PhD in linguistics. He talked about Spanish being a “full duplex language”, meaning that the information density was low enough it was possible (at least in casual conversation) to talk and listen at the same time. English was dense enough it was a “half duplex language” where you could listen, or talk, but not both simultaneously. His dissertation topic was going to be on cultural ramifications of that difference.
I’ve read a few articles about Spanish being either overlooked or resistant to AI. Some of the arguments were Spanish had more dialectical variants, Spain had stronger data laws. The articles vary from lauding it to complaining that AI models are English-centric. The point of your roommate may also play into it, a fully duplex language has reduced information density, which means that it is more difficult to derive logical principals out of it that a language that requires alternating turns
cf: https://www.youtube.com/live/CyyL0yDhr7I?si=1RiobEdzk1GiuOHp&t=2083
People tend to speak at about 39 bits of information per second, regardless of the language they’re speaking. Ben Shapiro and Steven Bonnell(Destiny) give the impression of speaking twice the normal English rate.
Since this is a thread about language…..
It occurs to me to wonder. How many of the ultra-macho xenophobes in this administration have a clue that “macho” is of Spanish origin?
Can we get a Hegseth/Miller cage match? Preferably with weapons like brass knuckles, which are non-lethal enough to have both get seriously damaged before one strokes out.
Not all of our immigrants are people. A lot of words came here and settled, too.
How Words Entered the English Language