In this second guest post, Lingo24’s founder Christian Arno talks about the joy of words and the hidden linguistic pitfalls that translators must avoid.
Linguistic diversity
As all translators will know, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to learn a second language. But with genetically-related languages such as Romance, there is often a certain degree of mutual intelligibility that aids understanding between the two languages.
The word ‘black’, for instance, can be negre (Catalan), noir (French), negro (Galician/Spanish), nero (Italian/Venetian), neir (Piedmontese) or negru (Romanian). And the word ‘shop’ can be magazin (Romanian) or magasin (French).
Of course, there are always the infamous false-friends that come along and ruin the show, such as carte which could refer to a ‘book’ if you’re in Romania, or a map/card/ticket if you are in France.
Spanish and Portuguese, in particular, are similar to the point of having a significant degree of mutual intelligibility for speakers of these languages. And to make matters worse, they can look almost identical on paper to those who have had little exposure to either language.
And this caused us at Lingo24 a little bit of bother not too long ago, after being asked to carry out an English to Spanish AND Portuguese translation.
After receiving the translated and fully proofread texts from us, the client asked if they could be reviewed again, as the translations seemed identical to each other!
However, this is not too uncommon, whereby we have to explain the subtle differences between two seemingly identical languages. But fortunately, most of our clients are only too happy to take the advice of a translation company with 7 years translation experience.
Dialectal differences
It also pays to be wary of the linguistic differences that exist between, say, the Spanish in Spain and the Spanish in many Latin American countries. For example, the word carro in Spain is a cart that you push or pull to transport things, whereas in Latin America it is an actual car that you can drive around in. A car in Spain is a coche, whereas a coche in Latin America is a baby stroller.
Similarly, dejeuner is ‘lunch’ in France, but ‘breakfast’ in French-speaking Switzerland and Belgium. And whilst France often import Anglicisms directly into their language, French-speaking Canada tend to translate the English terms directly: e.g. ‘Weekend’ is le weekend in France, but fin de semaine in Canada (literally: ‘end of the week’).
There are many dialectal differences within languages that help to highlight the importance of localisation when translating/transcreating texts for any market. For this reason, any translation company should only use locally sourced translators – so a text intended for the Swiss-French market should be proofread (if not translated…) by a native speaker, and the same applies to Canadian French or Latin American Spanish.
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