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.
6 days ago
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.
1 week ago
Just idle curiosity, but I wondered what did the translation:
In short, the position of the Government of Spain can be summed up in four words: no to war.
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.
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.
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.
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.