IDIOMAS
THE
ENGLISH
CORNER
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Texto: Araceli Pontaque Gracia (Dpto. Idiomas EGE – ZGZ)
Have you ever wondered how important
it is to know how to look a word up in a
dictionary properly? As easy as this may
seem it turns out to be a problem for
many people. But why? It can be said
that the lack of knowledge of the target
language can be one of the reasons, but
to be honest, the lack of accuracy and
interest together with accomplishing the
task as quickly as possible can be one of
the main reasons, let alone the use of
Google translator or any other device of
that kind.
The consequence of such an attitude
leads to horrible mistranslation of
words that do really defy belief. That’s
why we shouldn’t be surprised when native
speakers of the English language,
in our case, start frowning and making
funny faces when they read or listen to
words or sentences, trying to show that
they don’t understand what is being written
or said.
Non-native speakers of the language, in
our case Spanish speakers, have the “great
advantage” of getting to grasp the meaning
of the sentence as sometimes they
can “deduce”, in a certain way, what the
other non-native person wants to state,
either because a word is very similar both
in English and Spanish (what is commonly
known as “Spanglish”, that is not welcome
under any circumstances and even
in cases of the so called “false friends”) or
because there is a word in Spanish that
has different meanings in English and it’s
obvious that the wrong term has been
chosen from the dictionary.
Let us see some of those real examples
taken from Spanish speakers when translating
into English and test yourselves, as
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