"Placed with an international criteria in the market", but to whom does this refer?

In a world of staggeringly incompetent amateurs the website of Textiles Athenea is just run-of-the-mill hound-dog, so I wouldn't even mention it if someone hadn't wept an empathic tear at a job ad of theirs that came flashing past. Hmm, to be the sparkling hub of their textile pattern design, collection formation and trend spotting they're looking for a Fine Arts graduate with at least two years experience and

Portafolio Artisitico
Dominio de photoshop,illustrator y Corel
Orientacion a la moda y búsqueda de tendencias
Ingles nivel alto

The lucky applicant will start on 15K€ gross, which is to say roughly 1K net/month, or just above 7/hour worked, at a time when babysitters and cleaners are making 10. And all that to put up with an organisation which can't (be bothered to) spell "artistic" in a desolate village in Alicante province. London, here comes someone, and it probably ain't Athenea.

Facebook: if you form a civil partnership you must be gay

Chez Lexicool, via MM, Katia, who, using Facebook in English, described herself as being in a civil union with Juan, only to have a lucky escape from her mother-in-law, who, using Facebook in Spanish, had understood that this was in some sense a homosexual union, and was just about to order some educational literature from Amazon.es when light dawned.

This minor disaster is an unfortunate side effect of an initiative this time last year which, with the aim of doing well by doing good, broadened the repertoire of relationships available to include the options "in a civil union" and "in a domestic partnership." In many jurisdictions same-sex marriage may be the most common end facilitated by civil union legislation, but being able to form a legally recognised, affectionate partnership without taking on board marriage's historical baggage is valued by a wider public. So it's curious that the translation "unión civil" was rejected.

How does Facebook translate its UI? Is there some element of inverse correlation floating out there between the profitability of an enterprise and its willingness to pay for translation?

Galician gastronomy for people with false teeth, cats and dogs: chack it out!

From Don Colin and the Xunta de Galicia, some gruesome translation with the splendid tagline "Flavour Routes, chack them out!":

"Check them out" would be far too unenterprising for a region whose private-sector, while Catalonia was spending €150M of public money trying to turn Barcelona Airport into a global hub, quietly forged a privileged relationship with Colombian farmers. So "chack" it must be, but in which sense of the verb? Here's the OED ($ or British public library card ID):

1. Chiefly Sc. To snap with the teeth; to squeeze or crush with a snap of the jaws or by the sudden shutting of a window, door, drawer, or the like; also to make a noise like that of snapping teeth, to clack, clatter, click. Also gen., of the cry of a bird.

a1522    G. Douglas tr. Virgil Æneid (1960) xii. xii. 152   With hys wyd chaftis at hym makis a snak, The byt oft falȝeis for ocht he do mycht, And chakkis waist togiddir hys wapynnys wycht.

c1540    J. Bellenden tr. H. Boece Hyst. & Cron. Scotl. xiv. xi. f. 213/1,   Y^e cais chakkit to suddanlie but ony motion or werk of mortall creaturis.

a1689    W. Cleland Coll. Poems (1697) 35   Some's teeth for cold did chack and chatter.

 2. ‘Used of a horse that beats upon the hand when his head is not steady; but he tosses up his nose, and shakes it all of a sudden, to avoid the subjection of the bridle’ (Bailey Vol. II. 1731; and repeated in mod. Dicts.). ? Obs.

Opinion here is that the smart money is not on the horse but on 1. What I think the would-be Celts are trying to convey is that chattering of teeth which, in anticipatory delight and in some cases poisoned retrospect, accompanies the thought of small organisms scraped off rocks, garden birds and lame rabbits. Here's one video they might want to consider for the TV/online campaign:

And another:

There are rather less human than cat recordings on YouTube, but I found and liked Spookie Boogie. Chack it out:

Spaced out

Peter Harvey has discovered two spacious rooms, lightly high in the Alhambra.

"Room of the beds" is the literal translation of "Sala de las camas," which must lead not a few visitors to giggle and wonder what the difference is between a "room of the beds" and a bedroom. Traditional use in English for such spaces, often assumed by orientalists with imperialist agendas, pace Edward Said, to be regal knocking-shops, favours the evocative "chamber of repose," although you'd still have to drop "real," royal, in this layout.

How did the hall acquire its name? I don't think Washington Irving bothered about it, although he rather liked the view of the Vega from the tower-top. But a brief trawl fails to discover it in pre-mid-19th century Spanish. So were its name and function in fact dreamed up by an English-speaking tourist or a French army captain, translated poorly into Spanish once they realised there was money to be made and then back again? Is all human communication in fact an out-of-hand game of Chinese whispers? Etc etc.

English proficiency of the Spanish relative to other nations

La Información's reporter says that this publication by Education First, a teaching multinational with an interest in making target clients nervous, shows that of the European countries examined, only the Russians and Turks had worse English skills than the Spanish. He then left to finish his primary school geography class, and so didn't have time to wonder about the validity of a study which appears (p20) to have been based on the performance of relatively small minimum numbers per country (400) of self-selecting participants in online English tests, of which few details are given; a few more words about how the experiment functioned in say Kazakhstan as against Norway might have also been in order.

But never mind: there is praise (p3) from Dr. Napoleon Katsos of the "University of Cambridge Research Centre of [sic] English and Applied Linguistics," without it being mentioned that Education First seems at that stage to have been providing funding to the RCEAL. For whatever reason, RCEAL was merged in August 2011 with another group to form the university's Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. Amidst some less than impeccable German, Education First claims to have set up this department ("An der University of Cambridge haben wir das Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics eingerichtet"), but the DTAL is churlish enough not to mention this generosity, and at pixel time the only ghits for Education First on their site lead to dead pages.

So, two mysteries. But, while all this may look like nothing more than a scattershot marketing stunt, in the case of Spain the old smoke/fire adage may also hold true.

An interpretation masterclass from Les Luthiers

An old favourite, via Carlos:

Unnacompanied into the woods?

The other day someone gave me the (impeccable) English translation of Gabriel Tortella's classic El desarrollo de la España contemporánea. Historia económica de los siglos XIX y XX. I don't really understand why he uses 1900 to divide the period in two - on the basis of most of the indicators he cites, a tripartite split around 1875- and 1950-ish would make more sense. And it strikes me that better organisation of his statistics might have saved him a considerable amount of explanation. But in general it is extremely informative and entertaining, so by all means buy it via one of the links above and earn me 5% at no extra cost to yourself, etc etc.

Anyway, one of his early points is the long subsequent drag on economic development caused by low literacy rates. He worries that even now that most people can read they choose not to - the following may not have raised a great number of hackles:

Modern Spain is a country that is poorly understood, even by Spaniards themselves. Not generally studious by nature, they distrust the official versions of history (and they are right to do so), but this distrust has often led them to approach history with an attitude of repudiation (and they are wrong to do so).

If the proprietors had attached any importance to the written word, they could surely have had this sign (thanks Anon!) from their hotel near Valencia, a coast stuffed with Brits, fixed for free in five :

A Spanish problem? Well... for even though native English speakers generally can read and do so with apparent gusto, it is sometimes hard to believe that they profit greatly from the experience - contrast, for instance, Amazon's US sales and the grinding stupidity of American electoral discourse. One minor phenomenon flitting through marginal vision recently (numbers are lacking) has been the misspelling of the negation of a word which is itself correctly spelled, often in the same sentence. Take unnacompanied / accompanied, and then perhaps take pity on the Valencians.

[
If someone can deal with all this incoherence, maybe they can also explain the historical development of the Three Kings such that, opening their treasure chests, they now offer gifts of underpants.
]

The Alhambra as the opening titles from Mission Impossible

1966, and here's series 1, episode 1 of the Strine Bond:

Let's rewrite that:

Good morning, Mr. Irving,

Your mission, Washington, should you decide to accept it, is to compile a series of cultural and historical sketches laying the foundations for tourism policy in Granada and to a considerable extent in Spain in general.

As always, should any of the natives actually read Tales of the Alhambra, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

This record will self-destruct in five seconds.

Good luck, Washington.

Cue smoke:

I'm not sure that that I'd agree with the generous contributor that there's any translation angle here, but the tinge of semantic uncertainty, amplified by the archaic "only will be", provides yet another delicious khat-shift in perspective for those of us who would curtain a too-bright morning with the night.

People, fucked translation is our opium, let's smoke it while we can

Various posts here have been devoted to encouraging fucked translation from Spanish as a brand differentiator, where linguistic sloth and incompetence transmit a sensation of cultural authenticity and other stuff I'm afraid I can't remember, and don't particularly care to.

For I suspect that most of you care very little for all that crap, and send in tiny masterpieces of imbecility because they offer a glowing wormpipe to a different dimension, which still holds out against the compliance, HR, and arsebandits of all creeds and nations, who seek to inflict on us cultural greyout in the form of yet more freaking autobahns, James Blake albums, and conventional linguistic usage.

Contributions from Catalan suburbia have been in rather short supply, so I'm delighted with the following trip into Alice's rabbit hole just erected (we're talking three metres, lads) in quadruplicate by Mataró Parc, a mall a few miles up the Maresme coast from Barcelona.

"Wellcome" is clearly a tribute to Henry Wellcome, pharmaceuticals entrepreneur and benefactor of the über-splendid Wellcome Trust, and an instruction to you to inhale from that Sherlock Holmesian hookah (sometimes spelling does count):

What happens inside is up to you, but on exit your farewell is what I take to be an echo of between-wars manly jargon, of the type found in boys magazines, still widely used in Gateshead men's clubs, and developed significantly by Bobby Charles (See you later, alligator/In a while, crocodile), whence the repartee of Middlesbrough men's clubs (See you later, masturbator/In a while, paedophile):

But interpretation is in the bloodshot eye of the beholder, so loosen up, and I'll help you find a defence lawyer.

[
Dear reader, I am so sorry for these outbursts. If challenged, I will recount that one of my mother-in-laws almost nailed me the other day with a plate of oysters, which survived a sea of cheap cava and ferocious curry to set up home in my intestines. I will then enter a plea of insanitary.
]

Esperi el seu torn: Wait his turn

If I'd had less Campari, or rather if Campari were less toxic, I'd point you to a profusion of posts re the mistranslation of possessive pronouns in Romance languages, occasioned by confusing the third person with the polite second person form - su, or in this case el seu:

Since there is no stopping this train anyway, let me career into a Bad Santa punishment hallucination. Kindly soulds have been carefully explaining the grammatical differences between Iberian dialects and peripheral patois for at least 500 years, so some kind of beating is clearly in order, and maybe your man is concealed behind the boards, flogging all comers. If I've lost you, let me tell you that the real Bad Santa - Terry Zwigoff's - is, like his Ghost World and Crumb, simply splendid, and that its viewing might be of some comfort to anyone else condemned to spend the next few days dressed and burbling like a golf club arsehole.

(WTF do Sould Park do? I checked the website, but apart from figuring that they're in the sheds to the left when I go to Sant Antoni de Vilamajor I'm in the dark. Which may be my fault.)

(Thank you and a happy Götterdämmerung to Anon and all!)

(Discreet enquiry from upstairs: if this blog really has several hundred readers, why have only six converted themselves into members, or whatever it's called?)

(I actually like golf. One of my first steps on the path to dishonourable poverty consisted in stealing golf balls from the nooks and crannies of a rural course and reselling them at a discount.)