Lost in translation

Passport translation

When Jordin and I bought our bus tickets at the Terminal de Omnibus, the ticket vendor held onto the copy of my passport for an unusually long period of time. It started to scare me that something was wrong, especially when he called over his coworker to read something. I peaked through the glass to try and figure out what the two men were doing, and saw them reading aloud "WE....THE....PEOPLE" in broken English. They were trying to read what United States passports say...and if they could figure out what it meant.

We told the workers that this was "la primera estrofa de la constitución de los Estados Unidos," the first stanza of our constitution. He then had fun trying to read and pronounce anything on the rest of the passport...such as my name. "Kat-reen Ar-tay-mAS." It ended up being adorable that we practically made their day by teaching them some English translation. We ended this journey by being asked what the word "gross" is. I thought he said GROWS, and gave him 'crecer,' a Spanish verb for grows. Unfortunately, we think someone had received the insult of "gross" and translated into the proper Spanish adjective (grotesco/sucio) and told him what it meant.

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Translations at my internship

At work this week, I was translating a press release that requested customers to "spill the beans" about their thoughts on a topic. Translating phrases into Spanish like this is interesting, because sometimes they make no sense and other times they are incredibly direct. In fact, Stacey's boss has used the direct translation "romper el hielo" for "break the ice," which taught us that some phrases do have the same significance in other languages. I figured I would ask my coworkers what they thought of this phrase or even knew what it meant.

I asked if "derramar los frijoles" (spill the beans...literally) had a connotation in Spanish, and received long stares of confusion. Answer: I guess not. What disturbs me here isn't that I had to think of a simple way to paraphrase this saying, but something more. Somewhere, an American employee at a software company writing press releases for the Latin America region actually thought it was okay to use a phrase like "spill the beans." I ended up translating it to share your thoughts with us, but the lesson of the day here: if you are ever working for an international company, be careful with your language usage and writing.

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If you haven't yet noticed due to my lack of daily posts, I'm a little behind. Realistically, I'm not really behind on anything except the standard I set for myself. I am conquering more and more of Buenos Aires, going out of town Thursday through Sunday and doing something new in the city just about every day, in addition to writing Spanish homework assignments, researching to create an ecofeminism video for one of my internships and writing two four-page Spanish research papers. I hope to have Córdoba photos and stories published before I leave, because blogging not only shares your stories with the world, but helps me keep track of my trips!

To all in the Chicago suburbs, I hope you have electricity through all the storms! Thoughts and prayers!

Besos <3