Lost in translation

I am staying on the linguistic track in this post. But instead of Spanish here I am taking a closer look at the English presence in Buenos Aires. Given that I worked for several years with teams of Spanish-English translators here I could easily have been lead to believe that most Argentineans are fluent in English. However, since I speak Spanish I hardly ever get to know “general” people’s level of English. (Not that I think you need to speak English at all - as you all know by now from reading the blog my English is faaaar from perfect.) Some input I have snapped up from the society around me here has given me a notion that the matter of “knowing English” at least has a place on the agenda. I will share some “data” with you on this topic that I have gathered in a highly non-methodological way.

The first illustration is a commercial for diet-coke. The idea is to show how many said they would never drink diet-coke, but now they do. They compare it to several other situations asking people to raise their hands if they agree. One of these moments is “how many have sung along an English song only by “phonetics”” … Pay attention after more or less 20 seconds into the video.

Then we have this incredibly funny Peter Capusotto. He has a “rock show” on TV where his amazing characters present different videos and so on. He is sooooooooooooo funny and is definitely one of the top-ten comedians on my list. I am just so sad that his jokes not always translate well. You will probably get to see more of him here in the blog anyway since I am such a fan. Ok, back to the subject - English – hopefully this one translates!

One of his characters, Roberto Quenedi (yes he is using a Spanish spelling of Kennedy =) sings English songs phonetically. The picture here is the “album cover” of this character and it reads: “songs sung in shitty English”. Please, take a look at the clip for a better illustration.

The Spanish speaker voice says more or less:

“Beautiful songs that have accompanied us all our lives… They are songs that are pronounced perfectly in their original language – English. Now there is someone who sings them the same way you do – singing in “shitty” English. …with a terrible pronunciation, like yours, like ours”.

One of Pablo’s best friends has turned this “shitty English” thing into an art form. He is very creative as a person and comes up with incredibly good lyrics to the English songs he does not really 100% understand. Apart from being very inventive with song lyrics, he also has a brilliant way of handling spoken English. Since I (try to) speak Spanish my friends usually do not have to speak English to me. However, when I have foreign visitors coming over they do not generally speak Spanish and my Argentinean friends are always great about doing their best in trying to make themselves understood in the foreign Anglican language (with varying results). It should be added as well that not all my visitors speak perfect English either, so it is not always easy to keep the conversations going around let’s say a dinner table. But usually, thanks to a lot of food, good wine and “buena onda” we enjoy ourselves big time. This thing about not speaking the language perfectly even adds to the laughter, especially if our dear friend I mentioned earlier is part of the group. Let me give you some examples of some great use of English when it is at its best:

My brother in law Per was visiting and one night we all went out to this sailing club to make an asado/barbecue (of course). We went for a stroll to look at the boats and our resourceful friend wanted to make my brother-in-law aware of something slippery on the ground. So, he turned to him in the dark and said: “EYE”, pointing with one finger to his eye. Per, being Swedish and all, did NOT understand why this Argentinean was pointing to the eye and saying just that. In Swedish in makes no sense, and I do not think it makes any sense in English either. Of course our friend wanted to say OJO which, apart from the literal translation as “eye”, means sort of “watch out” in Argentinean Spanish.

Same people in this following setting: Per, Pablo, myself and some friends going to another asado at a friend’s house. During the dinner our imaginative friend comes up with yet another great direct translation. He tells a story and ends it with “but I did a big paper”. We all just looked at each other, no one had any clue what he was trying to express, neither us Swedes nor the Argentineans. So he says it to us in Spanish – you guessed it right? Papelón…

Wow, you can not imagine how much we laughed! And my poor brother in law still did not understand – which I suppose none of the non Spanish speaking readers do either. Short explication: “papel” in Spanish translates “paper” AND “role” (theatre/film meaning). And there is a saying – “papelón”- that literally translates “big role” but it means sort of to make a fool out of oneself. So, our friend tried to say that he made a fool out of himself but ended up saying big paper – qué papelón jajja!

Just imagine how many of these things I say when I (try to) speak Spanish 24/7…………………..