Category: Spanish

Articles, Books, Language Acquisition, Literary Translation, Spanish, Translation

New Words #15: It’s a Dude Group!

lnlanguage

Years ago, while teaching Spanish to beginners, I overheard the following exchange between two seventh-grade boys.

A. I think I’m supposed to write “Somos altos,” but it doesn’t seem right. I have four sisters. Isn’t it better to write “Somos altas,” since there are more girls than boys in the family?

B. Dude, if there’s even one dude in the group, that’s it, it’s a dude group.

I have had the phrase dude group stuck in my head ever since. As a translator, I am regularly faced with a quandary: How can I communicate in English that a French or Spanish text is referring to a dude group?

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French, Language Acquisition, Links, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #13: How Many Continents Are There?

lnlanguage

Years ago, when I gave my high school students an assignment (in French) to learn about the origins of the Olympic Movement, they were flabbergasted by the revelation that the Olympic rings represent “les cinq continents habités.” They had always been taught that there are seven continents, of which six are inhabited—but their French-language sources, along with the United Nations, were insisting that there were merely six continents, of which five were inhabited. What on Earth (literally) was going on?

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Articles, Books, Events, French, Language Acquisition, Literary Translation, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #11: Greetings, Dear Lady!

lnlanguage

It’s happening again. I’m getting LinkedIn messages from total strangers that open with phrases like “Hey, dear Nagle!” and “Greetings, dear lady!”

These greetings are jarring, especially in the context of a cold business contact, but it’s easy enough to imagine how they developed. If you’ve been taught that it is polite to use dear when opening a letter in English but also that Dear Ms. Nagle is too formal for online messages, you might attempt to strike a happy medium by doing a mash-up of formal and informal terms. And if it’s acceptable to address a crowd as “ladies and gentlemen,” then it must be polite to address an individual woman as “lady,” right? Well, not exactly.

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Books, French, Irish, Language Acquisition, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #7: If and/or When

lnlanguage

I will make dinner when I get home from work. A pretty straightforward sentence, right? Sure. But let’s take a closer look.

·      When does the dinner-making part happen? In the future, obviously. That’s why it says “will make.”

·      When does the getting-home-from-work part happen? Also in the future, duh. It’s right there in the sentence: when I get . . . Wait, that’s the present tense!

If English is your primary language, you say things like this all the time without thinking anything of it.

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