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.
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.