"In the sunny Balearic island of Mallorca, one wouldn’t dream of starting the day without a cup of coffee and this traditional sweet bread...Once you taste the pleasures of its flavors, we bet you’ll want to make it part of your wake-up routine too." This is how the...
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Translating Hernández
Que me aconseje el marlo que tengo que hacer:si matar, si querer. Small poems, like small dogs, are often the ones that give you the biggest headache. Take this short poem - fourteen words - by Spanish poet Miguel Hernández: looks easy at first glance, but it contains...
Marías and Hofstadter on the philosophy of translation
The narrator of Javier Marías' Corazón tan blanco (A Heart So White) is a translator and interpreter at the UN. At one point early in the book he makes the following rather curious assertion: 'Y es verdad que sólo lo que no se dice ni expresa es lo que no traducimos...
Sensuous impression merely!
Some words just sound nice. Sometimes this is because they describe something nice, like cafuné, a Brazilian Portuguese word which means to stroke someone's hair. Sometimes this is because they are satisfactory to say, like the Americanism tintinnabulation, which...
Backwards slangs 2: verlan
Shelta, Gammon or the Cant is (was) a form of slang used by gypsies in the British Isles. Among many other curious techniques to obscure the overt meaning of words, Shelta uses the same process of syllable inversion as Lunfardo: thus, mac, the Irish for son, becomes...
Guerilla translation: fansubbing
A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) movie or TV program is one which has been subtitled, 'by fans, for fans', independently of the rights holder. Although this phenomenon crops up anywhere on the web that people are watching TV in a foreign language, the real home of...
Backward slangs 1: Lunfardo
Lunfardo is a species of slang or argot from Buenos Aires. It originated towards the end of the Nineteenth Century as a criminal cant and spread from BsAs to Rosario, Montevideo and beyond. The real engine behind its diffusion was undoubtedly tango, which started off...
Translating Jabberwocky
How do you translate something which doesn't mean anything? If a text is written using words that don't exist in the original language, is it possible to translate that text into another language? This question is fundamental to the process of translating Lewis...
Facebook Digest 20/5/11: wordy rappinghood
...the pick of what we've been posting on the QuickSilver Facebook page this month... Two topical articles about languages in Europe, one on how 90% of European internet users prefer to surf in their own language, and the other from the BBC on the fact that that poor...
The shadow of his language
What does it mean to write in a language which is not your own? Here are three, radically opposed perspectives on what it means to write in a language which has been in some way imposed on your culture. Firstly, James Joyce describing the sensation of being a prisoner...